The myth of true lies

Suppose you assert a proposition p that you falsely believe to be false with the intention to deceive your audience. The standard view has it that you lied. This paper argues against orthodoxy: deceptive lying requires that p be in actual fact false, in addition to your intention to deceive by means of untruthfully asserting that p . We proceed as follows. First, an argument is developed for such falsity condition as the non-psychological component of lying. The problem with the standard view, we profess, is exactly that lying is a purely psychological relation between disbe-lief, assertion, and intention. Then, by scrutinising familiar cases, we revisit the alleged intuitive support for the existence of true lies. It turns out these intuitions can be explained away once we reflect on the characteristic deceptive hallmarks that are associated with the distinction between lying and botched attempts at lying. Finally, we examine the morality of lying in the light of said falsity condition. The resultant view emphasises our moral sensitivity to the practical consequences of acts of lying, while still accommodating those moral considerations that pertain exclusively to the psychological components of lying.

intent to deceive by means of asserting something you believe to be false is all it takes for you to lie.This paper argues against orthodoxy for a negative answer: your assertion must also in actual fact be false.To be clear, our aim is not to define any notion of lying but merely to show that true lies are a myth, which we shall attempt to debunk as follows.Section 2 makes the case for said falsity condition as the non-psychological component of lying.The key is to reflect on what constitutes the social function of deceptive lies.By scrutinising familiar cases, section 3 shows that intuitions in support of the existence of true lies can be explained away by appreciating the fact that lying and trying to lie are subjectively indistinguishable.Finally, section 4 critiques the moral case for such lies, which seeks to show that moral considerations pertain exclusively to the psychological elements of lying.

| DECEPTIVE LIES
The standard or traditional view of lying is that to lie is to make an untruthful assertion that p, used with the intention to deceive the person(s) to whom the assertion was made into believing p, where an untruthful assertion is an assertion in a disbelieved proposition, that is, a proposition that is believed false. 1 This view has a lot going for it.It captures prototypical instances of lying, and it respects the apparent plausibility that some false or untruthful assertions fall short of lying, as when making an honest mistake or stating a polite untruth (different from a white lie); for example, you tell friends of your flatmate at the door that she is away so as to make them believe that their visit is inconvenient even though she can be heard from the lounge. 2The view also heeds the fact that mere intent to deceive is insufficient for lying, as in the case of paltering, that is, actively using a truthful and true statement to convey a misleading impression, or a false implicature, for example, a spin doctor presents a heavily biased selection of data in order to portray a troubled politician in a more favourable light.Importantly for our purposes, the view has it that by means of asserting a disbelieved p, speaker S intends to deceive addressee A into believing p rather than merely intending to deceive A into falsely believing that S believes p.Only the first intention is a necessary condition on lying: (STANDARD VIEW) S is lying if and only if S asserts a disbelieved proposition p with the intention to deceive A into believing p.
Of course, there is no guarantee that S's intention to deceive A will succeed, as there may be reasons why A failed to believe p on the basis of S asserting as much.Whether S is persuasive enough, or A is credulous enough, for A to form such belief is irrelevant vis-à-vis the status of S's act as a lie. 3 Relatedly, "lie" is not a factive verb, or better, a success verb, in the sense of requiring some mental effect on A. Nor is "lie" a contra-factive, that is, a propositional attitude verb that stands to the falsity of its sentential complement as factive verbs stand to the truth of 1 Williams (2002), Van Cleve (2006), and Mahon (2008).Mahon's (2016) offers a summary of the literature on this view, tracing it back to Augustine (1952).Sometimes lying is couched in terms of making a statement, or one might even claim that remaining silent about relevant information with deceptive intent is lying by omission.While our arguments are compatible with understanding lying in such terms, we will continue to use assertion, assuming henceforth that S is conceptually competent, while pretending to be sincere in making that speech act.Others maintain that outright dis/belief is too strong as it rules out graded-belief lies, in which case one could either adopt Carson's (2006) ;Carson, (2010) condition of not believing p, or Marsili's (2018) ;Marsili, (2019) ;Marsili, (2021b) condition of being more confident in the falsity of p than in its truth, but for ease of exposition we shall stick with full dis/belief.Everything we say is compatible mutatis mutandis with such more fine-grained accounts.And we shall use "being deceptive" in the restricted sense of being deceitful by aiming to bring about a false belief, unlike Lackey (2013: 237), who takes concealing information, including evidence, and being deceitful as two distinct ways of being deceptive.On her view, lying involves an intention to be deceptive in this broader sense.theirs; for example, "know" embeds only true complements.Crucially, the reason is not that "lie" does not require falsity but rather takes no sentential complement at all, even if its contrary does. 4In contrast, "deceive" is a success verb in that such act demands that a certain state be produced in A. Nobody should dispute any of this.
Most recent literature on defining "lying" revolves around the condition of deceptive intent as integral to (STANDARD VIEW).While so-called deceptionists, for example, Mahon (2016) and Lackey (2013), hold that all lying requires that condition to be met, non-deceptionists maintain that there are cases of lying where S does not intend to deceive A. The following abridged cases, due to Carson (2006: 289-90), Carson, (2010: 20-1), aim at divorcing lying from such intent 5 : (JURY) A witness in court knows the accused committed the crime but falsely testifies that he did not see the defendant commit the crime.The witness speaks for fear of being harmed by him or his henchmen, and not with the intention to deceive the jury as he is hoping for the defendant to be convicted.
(DEAN) A student falsely affirms before the dean that he did not cheat on an exam, knowing that the dean always believes students are guilty whenever charged with misconduct, but also that the dean has an unofficial policy of never upholding a charge unless students confess to having cheated.The student is merely trying to avoid punishment.
Despite the existence of plausible accounts of the moral wrongness of non-deceptive lying, one might try to argue that (JURY) and (DEAN) fail to exemplify lying since nothing could explain why what the witness and the student did is morally wrong. 6Or one may insist that the witness in (JURY) and the student in (DEAN) aim instead to mislead the jury and the dean, respectively, into falsely believing that they believe what they say is true, or perhaps they intend to deceive their parents or the henchmen.Be that as it may. 7We shall not settle the question of whether all lies necessarily involve deceptive intent, and so we shall not adjudicate the dispute between deceptionsts and their opponents.Some arguably do not, 8 but the fact that an important, if not paradigmatic, kind of lie clearly does suffices for our purposes, as our arguments shall only be concerned with such lies.
So, let us restrict attention to deceptive lies, that is, those lies where deceptive intent is necessary, as per (STANDARD VIEW).To be clear, our claim is not that (STANDARD VIEW) offers a correct definition of deceptive lying, let alone of lying simpliciter, but merely that deceptive intent is required for deceptive lying. 9Henceforth, we shall only consider such lies, unless otherwise stipulated.Moreover, just as truthful assertions may be false, untruthful assertions may be true.On (STANDARD VIEW), either could be misleading, but neither is inevitably a lie. 10 S must also assert p with the intention of misleading A into believing p.That can happen only if the assertion is untruthful, but our question is whether deceptive lying requires 4 As Holton (2017: 246) noted, one reveals that p, but one does not lie that p. 5 See Fallis (2009) and Sorensen (2007Sorensen ( , 2010) ) for further examples of bald-faced lies, that is, cases where lying is common knowledge and thus undisguised, as in (DEAN), coercion-lies as in (JURY), and knowledge-lies, where asserting p is intended to prevent A from knowing that p is false, rather than to generate in A the belief that p. Lackey (2013) argues that none of these succeed in severing the connection between lying and deception.

7
For further details, see Mahon (2011), Faulkner (2013), Lackey (2013), andStokke (2019).Meibauer (2016) and Rutschmann and Wiegmann (2017), found evidence that the participants in their experiments to probe lay intuitions about bald-faced lies ascribe deceptive intent while regarding such cases as instances of lying.8 Rutschmann and Wiegmann (2017) also found evidence that so-called "indifferent lies", where S is indifferent as to what belief A forms, illustrate that lying and deceptive intent may come apart.9 Fallis (2018) argues that (STANDARD VIEW) offers an incorrect definition of deceptive lying, but on his own account deceptive intent is still necessary for such lying.See also fn. 13. the assertion to also be objectively false as a matter of entailment rather than cancellable implicature.What is striking is that (STANDARD VIEW) imposes no such falsity condition on lying: (FALSITY) S deceptively lies to A about p only if p is false.The problem with (STANDARD VIEW), we profess, is that lying is an all but psychological relation between (dis)belief, assertion, and intention: S lies as long as S disbelieves the asserted p with the intention to induce in A the belief that p. 11 True, the assertion component of lying has a social dimension, which is understood variously by Fallis (2013) as S intending to represent herself to A as believing that p is true, by Stokke (2018) as S proposing that p become part of the official common ground, and by Carson (2010) as S intending to guarantee or promise A that p is true.We shall not adjudicate between these but merely note that such intending and proposing are still mental acts.Our claim is rather that lying has a squarely non-psychological component: unless p is in actual fact false, there is no robust sense in which S lies about p in the relevant deceptive way. 12Consider the following argument for (FALSITY): (P1) S deceptively lying about proposition p requires that S intends to deceive A about p by means of making A believe that p is true on the basis of S's untruthful assertion that p.
(P2) If p is true, then A cannot possibly form a false belief that p on the basis of S's untruthful assertion that p.
(C1) So, if p is true, then S's intention to deceive A about p by making A believe that p is guaranteed to fail.A can at most form a false belief about what S believes about p on the basis of S's untruthful assertion, and so S's act may at best be deceptive in that way.
(P3) But S deceptively lying about p must at least afford the possibility that A be deceived about p, and not merely about what S believes about p, by way of forming a false belief that p on the basis of S's untruthful assertion that p.
(C2) So, S is deceptively lying about p only if p, as disbelieved and asserted by S, is false.Let us review each premise.(P1) follows from (STANDARD VIEW) insofar as this view concerns lies about the asserted proposition that S intends to deceive A about, and so for that reason (P1) does not beg the question against it.(STANDARD VIEW) omits specification of what S is lying about, but since S cannot lie without lying about something, we assume that S is lying about p given that p is what S disbelievingly asserts in order to saddle A with a belief that p.If some lies are deceptive about propositions other than the asserted proposition, then ignore those as well.In standard textbook cases, there's identity between the proposition lied about, 11 Turri (2016), Benton (2018), andHolguín (2021) defend a falsity condition by arguing for a knowledge view of lying according to which in asserting that p, S is lying if and only if S knows that p is false.Notably, an intention to deceive is not a defining feature of lying on this view, though, as Holguín notes, such intent could fairly easily be tacked onto it.Much of its alleged support stems from a commitment to a knowledge norm of assertion together with an assumption that lying involves assertion; however, as Marsili (2021b) argues, the knowledge view is not entailed by the conjunction of that commitment and assumption.Moreover, if one finds the case for knowledge-first epistemology empirically and theoretically compelling, one is likely to embrace a knowledge view of lying as well.In section 3, we assume merely that the norm of assertion is no weaker than belief.Friends and foes of the knowledge norm, indeed of the knowledge-first paradigm, can avail themselves of our arguments.Take Holguín's view according to which lying is an anti-assertion, that is, an assertion of the negation of what one could and should assert, were one to abide by the norm of assertion.To anti-assert is thus to mislead doubly: one asserts a falsehood when one could and should have asserted a truth.True lying would then a botched antiassertion, that is, the failure, through an uncooperative environment, to produce such assertion.A true lie is merely an attempt at lying.Since our case for (FALSITY) does not presuppose a knowledge view of lying, nothing prevents us from classifying what Holguín calls Gettier and lottery lies as genuine lies.Relatedly, Betz-Richman (2022) argues that some lies are expressed by untruthful hedged declaratives, which present a problem for an analysis of lying in terms of the knowledge norm of assentation, because in making such declaratives one represents oneself as having an epistemic attitude weaker than knowledge.Again, provided the relevant attitude is at least as strong as belief, Betz-Richman's argument is unproblematic for our view.
12 It follows that if some propositions are neither true nor false, they cannot be deceptively lied about.As is familiar, such truth-value gaps have been taken to explain utterance infelicity of sentences containing, say, indicative conditionals, empty terms, or vague expressions.But while assertions of such sentences may be misleading in various ways, they obviously cannot be deceptive by way of forming a false belief in the asserted proposition.Relatedly, Egré and Icard (2018) discuss cases in which S exploits the semantic indeterminacy of vague predicates to produce utterances that are true in one sense but false in another.Whether such half-truths should be considered lies depends, they argue, on the context in question.
that is, the asserted proposition, and the proposition about which deceit is intended. 13Keep also in mind that we are setting putative non-deceptive lies aside, and so no assumptions about deceptionism are made.(P1) only pertains to deceptive lies for which deceptive intent is required.Thus, (P1) does not rule out the existence of non-deceptive lies.Importantly, nothing about (P1) assumes the truth of (C2).An untruthful assertion is a believed-false assertion but not necessarily a false assertion.And no intention to deceive is guaranteed to succeed, and so it may be that the proposition in question is in actual fact true.On its own, (P1) does therefore neither rule out the existence of true lies.
(P2) is close to trivial on the intended reading where the modal operator takes wide scope: it's impossible that A's belief that p is false and p is true; assuming truth-values of beliefs are fully determined by the truth-values of their propositional contents.Contrast with the narrowscope reading: p is true and it's impossible that A's belief that p is false, which is false but also not how (P2) is meant to be understood.
To appreciate the plausibility of (P3) takes a little reflection.On the assumption that S is deceptively lying about p, the social function of such lies is, as a matter of constitutive fact, to deceive A about p.The reason is that all deceptive lies involve deceptive intentions to generate false beliefs, which manifest in a more or less widespread practice of actual deception.Such deceit is what deceptive lies are intentionally selected for, it's why we find them, occasionally in abundance, in society, and it's what they frequently bring about, contingent on the right mix of persuasiveness and credulity.This function serves the immediate purpose of inducing false beliefs in A, although typically their ultimate purpose pertains to some wider aims or further objectives regarding A's action on those beliefs.Deceptive lies acquire this function by design in that S intends that her act be deceptive in this way, but only against the background of a social pattern of actual deception.Deceptive lies could not have such function unless they often enough resulted in the formation of false beliefs.What matters is thus not only that the act is deceptive but that it came to be deceptive via (successful) manifestation of such intention amongst speakers.That means the aetiology is constitutive of its functionality: whether an act has that function, and hence whether it constitutes a deceptive lie, is not a perceptible or introspectable feature of it; nor is it an accidental feature in the way that an honest mistake can be misleading.Obviously, A may not actually be deceived about p on any given occasion.So, while there is no guarantee of deceit, seeing that "lie" is not a success verb, a deceptive lie is such that A is possibly deceived by S's act.We must distinguish between fulfilling a function and functioning properly: an item may function properly by reliably enough generating function fulfilment in normal conditions and yet not fulfil its function by not producing the functional effect, say, due to abnormal conditions.In our case, a deceptive lie may fail to fulfil its function of deceit on a given occasion, for example, if S is not persuasive enough, but no deceptive lie can cease to function properly, because its function of deceit is constitutive of it; that is, all deceptive lies are such that in normal conditions they will reliably enough generate fulfilment of that function, and so they must at least afford the possibility of deceit. 14Note also that the modality in (P3) is the same objective one as in (P2).If A knows that S is deceptively lying about p, the sense in which S's assertion could not deceive A is not what we have in mind.Ours abstracts away from any subjective features of S and A vis-à-vis the conversational exchange.
13 Following Fallis (2018), some deceptive lies involve so-called doxastic misdirection, where S disbelievingly asserts p simply to get A to believe that she believes p.In such cases, A knows that p is false, and S knows that A knows that p is false.Even though S is lying by asserting p, S is intending to deceive A about what S believes about p rather than p itself.See also Meibauer (2019) who argues that it's possible to lie by using deceptive conversational implicatures.14 Relatedly, Fallis (2015) argues that disinformation is misleading information that has the function of misleading someone, and so is non-accidentally misleading, although not necessarily intentionally misleading.Conspiracy theories are prototypical disinformation, but those who propagate them believe their content, and seek to convince others.Such theories acquire their function because their sources systematically benefit from their being misleading.Moreover, unlike lies, which are linguistic acts, disinformation can also be visual, as in the case of doctored photographs or fake maps.Now, (C1) follows from the conjunction of (P1) and (P2).For if p is true, it's impossible for A to form a false belief that p, and so A could not be deceived about p in the way intended by S, namely by making A believe p on the basis of S's untruthful assertion. 15That holds no matter how effective S is, or how gullible A is. S's untruthful assertion may of course lead A astray in some non-intended way, say, if it results in A falsely believing not-p, because A takes S to be a pathological liar yet a reliable believer.And (C1) and (P3) together entail (C2).For if a deceptive lie must allow that A could be deceived about p, by way of being prompted by S's assertion to falsely believe p, but the truth of p excludes such possibility of deceit in the intended sense, S cannot deceptively lie about p unless p is objectively false.Pace (STANDARD VIEW), (FALSITY) is thus needed.In its absence, the truth-conditions for claims about deceptive lying pertain exclusively to the psychology of S. Neither the facts about p, nor therefore the possibility of inducing false beliefs in A, play any role.But since p is typically about the external world, as what deceptive lies concern, if the truth-conditions of such claims are to capture their distinctive function, they ought to include a condition that the external world must meet. 16 Let us pause to ponder an objection that may spring to mind at this juncture.Our appeal to the social function of deceptive lies involves building their teleology into the truth-conditions of claims about them.But any such reference to what deceptive lies are supposed to do must accommodate the possibility of malfunction; that is, any teleological function must allow for a normative distinction between proper and abnormal functioning, that is, of what something is supposed to do but cannot do.That holds even in such cases as deceptive lying where pervasive societal manifestation of intentional selection establishes certain effects as the relevant function, without reference to an evolutionary history of selection and reproduction for those effects.The question is then whether true deceptive lies aren't simply dysfunctional lies but deceptive lies nonetheless, not because of some intrinsic defect but because the external world fails to corroborate, which would explain why they lack the propensity to deceive.The answer is that such abnormal function is supposed to manifest in particular tokens of a (trait or functional) type.Hearts have the function of pumping blood, but hearts cannot be selected for pumping blood by natural selection unless some hearts pump blood.A specific heart with an atrial septal defect retains that function despite being unable to perform it but only because hearts normally pump blood. 17In the alleged case of true deceptive lies, however, no such token lies of any type have the propensity to deceive.To repeat, A cannot possibly be deceived into forming a false belief on the basis of S's true assertion.That means such lies do not have the function of deceit; they are no more deceptive lies than lame ducks are ducks.Still, our account can honour the distinction between proper and abnormal functioning in that token genuine deceptive lies may fail to deceive due to S being insufficiently convincing or A being insufficiently credulous.
In light of the foregoing, consider therefore the following amended definition: (REVISED VIEW) S is deceptively lying about p if and only if S untruthfully asserts the false proposition p with the intention to deceive A into believing p. 18To be clear, the previous argument, and the further considerations we bring to bear in sections 3 and 4, only seek to provide support for (FALSITY).Our aim is not to defend 15 The claim is that S's intention to deceive is destined to fail, not that S cannot form an intention which is impossible to fulfil.More generally, Audi (1973) and Davidson (1978) argued that belief constraints intention such that one cannot rationally intend to do the impossible, but they had in mind believed-impossible action; roughly, S must believe she can Φ if S intends to Φ.For opposition, see Anscombe (1957).Nothing we say hangs on this dispute as S clearly does not believe that her intention to deceive A is impossible.
16 Carson (2006: 284) observed that showing p to be true is always sufficient to counter an accusation of lying.If A has good evidence that S in asserting p is intending to deceive A about p, then A may have a sufficient prima facie reason to accuse S of lying to A. But if unbeknownst to them, p is true, then that reason would be defeated.Relatedly, Holguín (2021) argues that sentences of the form "I know S spoke truly, but I do not know whether S lied" seem only to have false readings.Or consider "I know S lied but I do not know whether S spoke truly," which sounds equally improper.Against the background of such linguistic data, Holguín takes "true lie" to sound like an oxymoron.
(REVISED VIEW) in its entirety; the modest claim is merely that friends of (STANDARD VIEW) should incorporate (FALSITY) by adopting (REVISED VIEW), and foes should endorse similarly revised versions of their preferred view insofar as they pertain to deceptive lies.One may wonder whether (FALSITY) also applies to non-deceptive lies, assuming their existence, and hence to all lies simpliciter; after all, (JURY) and (DEAN) both involve a false proposition.Since, to repeat, we remain agnostic in the debate over whether all lies involve deceptive intent, we confine our argument strictly to deceptive lies.

| WAVERING INTUITIONS
Most of the debate over (FALSITY) has revolved around intuitions elicited by possible cases of supposedly true deceptive lies.Some philosophers rely evidentially on their own intuitive judgements, 19 while others conduct empirical studies to determine how lay people classify such cases.In section 2, we offered a novel philosophical argument in favour of (FALSITY), and in section 4 we shall support (FALSITY) by other philosophical considerations, but this section is devoted to the intuitional evidence over which the latter experimental philosophers disagree. 20 We'll survey the literature on whether intuitions lend support to the existence of true deceptive lies, and then adapt two cases in order to scrutinise the significance of such findings; the first is due to Sartre (1939: 297-8)  21 and the second to Carson (2006: 285); Carson, (2010: 16): (PRISONER) Pablo Ibbieta, a prisoner sentenced to be executed by the Falangists, is interrogated by his guards as to the whereabouts of his comrade Ramon Gris.Mistakenly believing Gris to be hiding with his cousins, Ibbieta untruthfully asserts to the guards that Gris is hiding in the cemetery, with the intention that they believe this assertion to be true in order to protect his political ally.As it happens, Gris is hiding in the cemetery, and so the assertion is actually true.Consequently, Gris is arrested at the cemetery, and Ibbieta is allowed to join the prisoners in the yard who aren't awaiting execution.
(FISHING) Jim goes fishing on a boat with his friend John.Both catch a fish at the same time.Although they do not realise it, their lines are crossed.Jim has caught a very big fish and John has caught a little one, but they wrongly believe that Jim caught the small fish and John caught the big one.They throw the two fish back into the water.Jim goes home thinking that he caught a small fish.When Jim returns, his father, an avid fisherman, asks him how he did.Jim says that he caught a very large fish and threw it back into the water, thereby intending to deceive him about the size of the fish that he caught.
Both involve, as it were, dishonest mistakes.When someone makes an honest mistake, they accidentally say something false when they intend to speak truly, but in these cases the protagonists inadvertently say something true when they intend to speak falsely.
Most experimental work, such as the studies in Coleman and Kay (1981) and in Strichartz and Burton (1990), on (adult) laypeople's intuitions about such cases as (PRISONER) and (FISHING) supports the falsity of (FALSITY). 22But Turri and Turri's (2015) seems to swim against the tide.When presenting their lay participants with vignettes similar to (PRISONER) and (FISHING), they found strong evidence that only false assertions are lies: only 10% classified a dishonest but true assertion as a lie, whereas 90% classified a dishonest and false assertion as a lie.The key was to allow participants to acknowledge intent to lie while separating that 19 Foes of (FALSITY) include Siegler (1966: 131), Mahon (2008: 218), Fallis (2009: 39;2015: 408), Stokke (2018: 32-35), Lackey (2013: fn.9), and Lackey (2020: 169, fn.11), whereas Carson (2006Carson ( , 2010) is, at least tentatively, a friend.20 Wiegmann and Viebahn (2021) offer an argument against (FALSITY) that is not based on (empirical studies on) intuitions about possible cases but rather on intuitions about a class of pairs of (Moorean) assertions.
judgement from an attribution of actual lying.For when the male protagonist in the vignettes made a dishonest, yet as it happened, true assertion, the participants reported that he tried to lie, and thought he was lying, but in actual fact failed to do so.What then explains the minority intuition of lying?Turri and Turri suggest two possible confounds: (a) empathy primes perspective-taking, so maybe the participants have answered in accordance with how things seem to the protagonist, who, after all, is psychologically as if he was lying; (b) participants might have used the test question as an opportunity to register their disapproval of the protagonist's conduct, and in the absence of a distinction between actually lying and appearing to lie, the best available option is to say that he lied.
However, Wiegmann et al. (2016) offered an alternative explanation of these findings based on conversational pragmatics, namely that splitting up the two-part response options into a trying-and result-part ("S tried to lie but didn't" and "S tried to lie and did lie") is illicit, as such prior stimuli pressure lay participants into treating truth-value as relevant when they ordinarily would not consult such information in answering the test questions.The participants in Turri and Turri's studies did embrace true lies but were led by the response options to interpret the test question as being mainly about whether the protagonist's assertion was false rather than whether the protagonist lied.Moreover, they also ran further studies to support the falsity of (FALSITY).By adding the fact that the assertion turned out to be true to the response options in Turri and Turri's setup, Wiegmann et al. found that a clear majority of participants chose the option that the protagonist did lie.
The results from Turri and Turri's recent experiments (2021) provide evidence that truthvalue is conceptually related to whether an assertion counts as a lie.In particular, this holds even when the participants were asked to spontaneously (and so without bringing up "lying" or "true"/"false") describe deceptively motivated assertions; the only manipulation concerned their truth-value.In some of their experiments, participants explicitly and unprompted distinguished between trying to lie and actually lying, or based their lie attribution on perspective-taking, which suggests that such responses are not unnatural.Against this background, Turri and Turri (2021) conclude that experimental evidence suggests a conceptual link between lying and truthvalue, and that at present, the best supported interpretation of the link is that, as in Coleman and Kay (1981) and Hardin (2010), (i) our ordinary lying concept is a prototype concept, summarising falsity as one of its central tendencies.On this view, falsity is essential to the ordinary concept, because the prototypical lie is false, but being false is not strictly necessary for a lie.Everybody agrees that if true lies exist, they are rare and atypical occurrences; indeed, Turri and Turri (2021) found evidence that true lies are not prototypical.However, (FALSITY) requires that, as a matter of necessity, lies are false, and so far, given the methodological problems identified by Wiegmann et al. (2016) with Turri and Turri's study, no clear-cut experimental evidence in its support has emerged so far.Still, Turri and Turri (2021) insist the following, somewhat bolder, interpretations of the evidence to date should not be ruled out as a possibility: (ii) the ordinary concept requires falsity, but lay performance on lie attributions is obscured by confounds interfering with people's responses; (iii) falsity is inessential to this concept, but this is also obscured albeit by other such interfering factors; or (iv) multiple ordinary concepts must be posited, one of which requires falsity.More experimental work is needed to fully understand how (a) perspective-taking, (b) blame validation, and other mechanisms, may interfere with lie attributions.Moreover, Turri (2021) argues that, on balance, (FALSITY) is favoured by a broader range of evidence than mere appeal to lay intuitions about possible cases.He cites evidence from history, logic, social observation, popular culture, lexicography, developmental psychology, and behavioural experimentation.For example, the so-called truth-teller and liar problems, as popularised by Smullyan, for example, in his (Smullyan, 2011), all assume that these two fictional characters are mutually exclusive.And the liar paradox assumes that "all lies are untrue", as in Beall et al. (2020), for an utterance of "I'm lying now" would not be paradoxical if it were a true lie.
Despite current counterevidence from experimental philosophy, we shall thus assume that (FALSITY) is very much a viable view. 23Let us proceed to delve deeper into the philosophical underpinnings of these empirical findings.To recap, if p is true, S cannot possibly deceive A into falsely believing p; and so, we claim, S cannot deceptively lie about p, but S is still seeking to deceptively lie and believes that S is lying.For S to try in vain to deceptively lie is for S to satisfy the psychological condition of untruthfulness and deceptive intent but not the nonpsychological condition (FALSITY).From S's perspective, lying and trying to lie, in the deceptive sense, are subjectively indistinguishable.So, to say that some philosophers are mistaking the former for the latter is to say they are mixing up deceptive lying with its psychological counterpart. 24Not only are these, as per (a) above, indiscernible from S's point of view but both are also deceptive albeit in different ways. 25A deceptive lie has the potential to deceive A about p, but S's failed attempt at deceptively lying retains the potential to deceive A about what S believes about p, and these are easily muddled up.How so?In the latter case, S asserts p while falsely disbelieving p.It may be that S has an intention to deceive A about what S believes about p, but such additional intent neither turns S's act into a deceptive lie about what S believes about p, nor is it necessary for the act to be deceptive vis-à-vis what S believes about p. 26 For when S untruthfully asserts p, S contravenes an epistemic norm of propriety by which assertion is governed.Pretty much everyone agrees that the standard of that norm is no weaker than belief. 27That means asserting p is proper (or appropriate) only if S believes p.By asserting p, S represents herself as conforming to that norm and the practice it governs such that when S asserts p untruthfully S gives the misleading impression of complying with it.Put differently, the norm gives the condition on which S has the epistemic authority to make an assertion. 28 When S then asserts p without satisfying it, S is acting without having the authority, and such dishonesty has the potential to lead A astray in forming a false belief about what S believes about p.If A is misled in that way by S's assertion, then A's deception may thus stem from S's violation of a norm of assertion. 29So, what explains away the intuition of lying when p is true is that any botched attempt at lying is deceptive about what S believes about p by way of violating such norm, and so any such attempt has the deceptive hallmarks associated with the psychological condition on deceptive lying, thus making the former easily confused with the latter.
Let us illustrate the foregoing, beginning with (PRISONER).Ibbieta asserts that Gris is hiding in the cemetery, while convinced he is hiding with family, with the intention to deceive his guards so as to save his comrade's life.As Ibbieta's assertion is unwittingly true, his act 23 It's not uncommon that a plausible, and indeed widely accepted, philosophical view or claim is not supported by intuitional evidence.For instance, most epistemologists take fake-barn thought experiments to show that justified true belief falls short of knowledge, because, say, the belief is modally unsafe or insensitive, but Colaço et al. (2014) reported a study showing that lay people do attribute knowledge in such cases.24 Holguín (2021) also proposes the hypothesis that the tendency to slip between talk of lying and talk of trying to lie is what explains judgements in cases of so-called true lies.While he explicitly offers no debunking explanation of the intuitions in favour of the existence of true lies, he does mention (Holguín, 2021: 17) that lying and merely attempting to lie are "internally indistinguishable".As mentioned in fn.11, Holguín takes the former to be an anti-assertion and the latter would be a botched anti-assertion, where the only reason one fails to anti-assert is that one's environment is uncooperative.

25
We revisit (b) in the section 4.

26
S is not asserting that S believes p, because that is not what S is saying, nor is a lie about what S believes pragmatically implicated by S's assertion that p in conjunction with intent to deceive A about what S believes.Following Simpson (1992), Faulkner (2007: 537) claims that S possesses two distinct deceptive intentions: an intention to deceive A about p by further intending to deceive A as to S's belief about p.In line with (STANDARD VIEW), we only insist that an untruthful assertion be made with the former intention.

27
Prominent candidates roughly in order of strength are: certainty (Stanley, 2008), knowledge (Williamson, 2000), justified belief (Kvanvig, 2009), rational belief (Douven, 2006), reasonable belief that one knows (Lackey, 2007), andbelief (Bach, 2008).Even for norms of assertion short of belief, such as being propositionally justified, we can still connect belief to assertion.Thus Goldberg (2015: 147) defines p as "belief-worthy" relative to S when, given S's epistemic perspective, it would be epistemically proper to believe p.In the case of the latter norms we can then say that p, as asserted by S, is belief-worthy relative to S, and so at least belief-worthiness is required for proper assertion.
28 Goldberg (op. cit.) 29 Note that while the norm is constitutive of the speech act of assertion, in much the same way as rules are constitutive of games, it does not prescribe a necessary condition for performing the constituted act.Flouting the norm is therefore compatible with performing that speech act.See also Simion and Kelp (2020).
constitutes no deceptive lie.By our lights, Ibbieta cannot possibly deceptively lie about something which his guards cannot possibly be deceived.What accounts for intuitions to the contrary is that Ibbieta is trying to deceptively lie, and believes he is lying, about Gris' hiding place.In so doing, Ibbieta is psychologically apt to lie, and so is deceptive about his own beliefs regarding Gris' whereabouts in that he flagrantly violates a belief norm for assertion.Such duplicity might be misinterpreted as a proper deceptive lie.
The same holds mutatis mutandis for (FISHING).Jim asserts what he disbelieves, namely that he caught a large fish, with the intention to deceive, so as to impress, his father.Unbeknownst to Jim, his assertion is true, since John was the unlucky one who caught the small fish.Again, Jim cannot be said to deceptively lie about the size of the fish, as there is no possible room for deception on that score.Still, by making an untruthful assertion, Jim wilfully disregards a belief norm for assertion, which could mislead his father into forming a false belief about what Jim believes.Since everything psychologically about Jim is as if he is deceptively lying about the size of that fish, being deceptive about his belief appears similar to being deceptive about its content, which makes it tempting to misconstrue his act as a genuine deceptive lie. 30

| MORAL IMPLICATIONS
Section 3 cited empirical evidence for widespread, though not universally shared, intuitions in support of imposing (FALSITY).Such conflicting responses aren't indicative of a merely verbal dispute over the application of "lie", or the concept it expresses, in the deceptive sense.We demonstrated that intuitions for and against (FALSITY) are explicable in terms of substantial philosophical considerations.The upshot is that in conjunction with the argument for (FALSITY) in section 2, those philosophers who are otherwise persuaded by (STANDARD VIEW) should instead adopt (REVISED VIEW) insofar as deceptive lies are concerned.In this last section, we shall argue that moral deliberations also speak against the existence of true lies.
In section 2, we argued that the social function of deceptive lies is to deceive A about p which S asserts but disbelieves.Deceptive lying is consistent with A not actually being deceived into believing p, but no act is a deceptive lie if it could not possibly induce such belief, no matter how impressive S is or how impressionable A is.For otherwise deceptive lying could not have acquired by design its constitutive function of deceit.That means S deceptively lies only if p is false, on pain of rendering such deception impossible.It also means that any deceptive lie puts A at risk of suffering (epistemic or other) harm as a result of being lied to.A worry one may have is that our moral judgements about deceptive lying and associated harm are indifferent to (FALSITY); what is important, the thought goes, is only that the psychological condition be met, that is, as per (STANDARD VIEW), that S untruthfully asserts p with deceptive intent. 31For example, Stokke (2018: 34-35) claims that if we suppose the father in (FISHING) subsequently discovers the truth about the crossed lines but also realises that neither of the fishermen is yet aware of this mishap, then the father would "feel just as indignant as he would feel had he not also found out the truth about the crossed lines".What matters to his "feeling of resentment" is that his son Jim asserted a disbelieved proposition; its actual truthvalue is simply morally irrelevant, or so the claim is.

30
One might worry that the foregoing has the untoward consequence that lie detectors are unreliable in detecting lies, because these polygraph tests focus on physiological indicators of deception, for example, perspiration and pulse rate, and so at best provide evidence of the psychological components of lying.While (FALSITY) certainly introduces another way in which such detectors can go wrong, it remains true that most ordinary liars reliably track the truth, and so not easily would their belief that they are speaking falsely be mistaken.The first observation to make is that assertion arguably involves a commitment to the truth: in asserting p, S commits herself to p being true. 32That means asserting p has normative consequences for S in that S is accountable for the truth of p, and thus reproachable, or liable to be criticised, if p turns out false and S is not excusable in some way.But if it's right that S should face sanctions if p, as asserted by S, turns out false, and S cannot appeal to any extenuating circumstances, then truth-value clearly matters morally vis-à-vis the assertion component of lying.In fact, by asserting p S also incurs a kind of discursive responsibility, such as not to make further contradictory statements, or to defend the assertion that p with adequate evidence if appropriately challenged.
Our strategy is less about the normative dimension of assertion and more about the practical consequences of lying.Take two cases in which S and her psychological twin S* both untruthfully assert p with a deceptive intention to bring about in A the belief that p.The difference is that p is true in the case of S, while p is false in the case of S*.Because of the difference in truth-value, their respective acts involve different types of deception with different practical consequences for A, which in turn imply different (strengths of) moral judgements.This moral difference (explanandum), we contend, is best explainable in terms of whether those acts constitute a deceptive lie (explanans), because that is the simplest and most salient non-moral difference between S and S*, and moral supervenience demands that there be one.After all, the different moral judgements pertain to their respective acts, and so the best non-moral way of explicating that difference is one that renders those very acts different in kind: while both tried to deceptively lie, only S* succeeded.Given that we hold fixed every psychological aspect of S and S*, a difference in deceptive lying requires that (FALSITY) be adopted.To wit, deceptive lying involves deception with real-world effects to which our moral judgements are sensitive, and so the morality of such lying is not merely a question of being attuned to the psychology of the liar.
True, the fact that S said something true while S* said something false is a more basic nonmoral difference in our twin-cases, but not one that can adequately explain the relevant moral difference.For such difference in truth-value of their respective assentations does not on its own account for the different moral judgements.Clearly, the relevant non-moral difference must consist in certain non-semantic features.Thus, perhaps the moral difference is instead due to the different practical consequences of their respective assentations, rather than any difference in deceptive lying, which would also be in keeping with moral supervenience.In reply, reflect first that this proposal still conflicts with the claim that moral judgements exclusively bear on the psychology of the liar, and in particular that feelings of resentment or indignation only concern the assertion of disbelieved propositions.Secondly, while this proposal may have some merit, it overcomplicates the explanans; in fact, given that the explanandum is about a moral difference between the acts of S and S*, we need an additional explanation of why these acts led to those different consequences.And of course, if both S and S* are taken to deceptively lie, which would be the case if such lying were merely a question of satisfying certain psychological conditions, then their acts of lying cannot explain the difference in practical consequences.At this juncture, the proposal would have to appeal to a difference in truth-value.All of this can be cut short by simply letting the explanans be down to a difference in deceptive lying. 3332 This paragraph owes much to Marsili's (2021a), but see also Carson (2006Carson ( , 2010)).

33
The difference in practical consequences is key to the moral difference between the acts of S and S*.For example, take Marsili's (2021b) new evil liar cases, involving Pinocchio, who knowingly asserts a falsehood, and his duplicate Malocchio, who does not know that what he asserts is false, either because the assertion is true, or because he's been Gettierized, or because he inhabits an evil demon world in which he knows nothing at all.Marsili takes Pinocchio and Malocchio to be equally morally blameworthy in all three instances, because "they acted in the same way, with the same intentions and consequences, and for the same reasons" [emphasis added].And that may well be problematic for a knowledge account of lying, though Holguín (2021) suggests that being internally indistinguishable, for example, they both believe they lied, suffices to explain the intuition of equal blameworthiness.Be that as it may, our cases are crucially different as they elicit the intuition that the consequences of their acts matter to our moral judgements, and our aim is not to settle the question of a knowledge account of lying.
By way of illustration, let us develop (FISHING) a bit further.In one case, Jim untruthfully, yet truly, asserts that he caught the larger fish, for the purpose of deceiving his father into believing just that.Unbeknownst to Jim, his and John's fishing lines were crossed.In another case, Jim* asserts the same disbelieved proposition, with the same deceptive intent, but falsely so, as no lines were crossed.Suppose they both know that their father has placed a huge bet on them catching a larger fish than John, and that the terms of the betting company are such that reporting any false information will result in a hefty fine.Jim's father wins the bet after discovering the truth about the catch, whereas Jim*'s father loses the bet.Moreover, Jim's father is not deceived about the size of the fish, but he is still entitled to feel wronged in that Jim was deceptive about his beliefs, and thus deceitful to his father, betraying his trust. 34However, his father's feeling of resentment or indignation is certainly lessened, if not dwarfed, by the joy of learning that he won a large sum of money.In contrast, Jim* was deceptive twice over: about his belief and its content.Not only would his father resent the same breach of trust, he would also experience being misled by Jim*'s assertion into forming a false belief about its content, which makes for a stronger sense of disapproval, especially when Jim* knew his father would incur a severe penalty for submitting false information.Such morally different sentiments about Jim and Jim* must be down to a non-moral difference between them, and since they are psychologically indiscernible, the relevant difference is that only Jim* deceptively lied.To make that inference requires (FALSITY).
Consider now (PRISONER).In one case, Ibbieta asserts the disbelieved, but as it happens, true proposition that Gris is hiding in the cemetery, for the purpose of deceiving his guards into believing just that.In another case, Ibbieta* also untruthfully makes that assertion with the same deceptive intent, although falsely as Gris is actually hiding with family.In the first case, the guards arrest Gris at the cemetery while Ibbieta is merely held captive, whereas in the second case they execute Ibbieta* immediately after having searched the cemetery in vain.The guards will in both cases no doubt feel anger for being untruthfully asserted to, but since no relationship of trust exists, what would mostly infuriate them is surely Ibbieta*'s successful deceptiveness about the truth in the second case, as evidenced by their swift punishment.In the first case, the guards aren't deceived by Ibbieta about Gris' whereabouts, and their satisfaction of arresting Gris at the cemetery will likely overshadow any resentment felt towards his dishonesty; what matters to them is above all that Gris be detained.However, while we disapprove of the dishonesty in both cases, we would, in view of the guards' wicked plans, regard attempting to deceive them about the hiding place as the all-things-considered right thing to do.The difference is that our moral judgements are more favourable towards Ibbieta* in the second case, where he succeeds in deceiving the guards, thus saving Gris' life.In the first case, Ibbieta's attempt at deception fails spectacularly.Given that Ibbieta and Ibbieta* are psychological duplicates, such moral difference is down to the fact that only the latter deceptively lied.That's possible only if (FALSITY) is endorsed.
As mentioned earlier, Turri and Turri (2015: 163) suggest that (b) their participants might have registered their disapproval of the protagonist's conduct in vignettes similar to (FISHING) and (PRISONER) by saying that he lied when not presented with the option of him merely trying to lie.But once that distinction is available, the vast majority prefers the latter.Turri and Turri (2015: 167) conclude that while lying is not a purely psychological act, "the social function of lying attributions seems mainly tied to our disapproval of dishonesty or deceptive intent [as these] breach the trust just as much as successful lies do".True, one would resent a breach of trust irrespective of whether one is being deceptively lied to or merely the subject of deceptive intent, and while our moral judgements certainly concern, or perhaps are even "mainly tied" to, such intent, they aren't exclusively so restricted.For our sense of disapproval 34 See also Faulkner (2007), who argues that a reactive attitude of resentment is appropriate when being let down by a liar in whom one affectively trusts to tell the truth.Relatedly, Carson (2006: 292) views lying as breaking a promise to communicate truthfully.

31Augustine(
Op. cit.: De mendacio 3.3) claimed that the "objectionable feature of lying is the desire to deliberately mislead in what one says."