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| Stephen Wright |
I'm Stephen Wright, a lecturer at the University of Oxford. I completed my PhD at the University of Sheffield in 2014, I mainly work on issues in epistemology and the philosophy of language. Whilst my research is primarily in the epistemology of testimony, I have recently been thinking about philosophical issues concerning lying, in preparing a piece for the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Lying edited by Jörg Meibauer.
One of the questions at the centre of philosophical investigations into lying concerns what exactly lying is. In particular, I have been looking at the question of whether lying involves saying something that is untrue, or something that is untruthful. Put another way, the question is whether what I say can be a lie only if it is false, or if it merely seems to me that it is false.
Those that defend that idea that lying involves saying something untrue endorse the following claim:
(1) S’s statement that p is a lie only if p is false.
Thomas Carson (2010) endorses (1). According to Carson, someone’s statement is a lie only if it is false. The evidence for this comes from the observation that we cannot charge someone with lying once we find out that what she said was true. If you tell me that the portrait in the hall has been taken away and I accuse you of lying, it looks as though, when we go and check and find out that the portrait in the hall has in fact been taken away, I ought to retract my accusation.
One of the questions at the centre of philosophical investigations into lying concerns what exactly lying is. In particular, I have been looking at the question of whether lying involves saying something that is untrue, or something that is untruthful. Put another way, the question is whether what I say can be a lie only if it is false, or if it merely seems to me that it is false.
Those that defend that idea that lying involves saying something untrue endorse the following claim:
(1) S’s statement that p is a lie only if p is false.
Thomas Carson (2010) endorses (1). According to Carson, someone’s statement is a lie only if it is false. The evidence for this comes from the observation that we cannot charge someone with lying once we find out that what she said was true. If you tell me that the portrait in the hall has been taken away and I accuse you of lying, it looks as though, when we go and check and find out that the portrait in the hall has in fact been taken away, I ought to retract my accusation.
(2) S’s statement that p is a lie only if S believes that p is false.
The idea is that what matters is not so much the truth or falsity of the speaker’s statement, so much as whether or not the speaker believes it to be true. For example, if I am attempting to conceal a fugitive in my house and I tell you that there is nobody hiding in my house, it seems that my statement is still a lie even if the fugitive has in fact escaped without me knowing it.
Of course, since (1) and (2) respectively only purport to state necessary conditions on lying, one might perfectly well endorse them both—they do not rule one another out. Indeed, this is Carson’s position. But many find (1) unintuitive for the reason given in the previous paragraph and I think there’s an intuitive reason to be suspicious of (2) as well.
The reason comes from a locus classicus in the literature concerning lying—Chisholm and Feehan’s (1977) discussion. Suppose that I tell you that there are robbers in the road. Chisholm and Feehan distinguish between two cases:
(i) I believe that there are no robbers in the road.
(ii) I believe that there ‘there are robbers in the road’ is false.
The idea is that, in (i) I believe the negation of what I say, whereas in (ii) I believe a ‘second-level’ about the proposition ‘there are robbers in the road’ which requires the concept of being false as applied to sentences.