Don Fallis

According to the traditional philosophical definition, you lie if and only if you say something that you believe to be false and you intend to deceive someone into believing what you say. However, philosophers have recently noted the existence of bald-faced lies, lies which are not intended to deceive anyone into believing what is said. As a result, many philosophers have removed deception from their definitions of lying. According to Jennifer Lackey, this is ‘an unhappy divorce’ because it precludes an obvious explanation of the prima facie wrongness of lying. Moreover, Lackey claims that there is a sense of deception in which all lies are deceptive. In this paper, I argue that bald-faced lies are not deceptive on any plausible notion of deception. In addition, I argue that divorcing deception from lying may not be as unhappy a result as Lackey suggests

Donald Davidson once suggested that a liar ?must intend to represent himself as believing what he does not?. In this paper I argue that, while Davidson was mistaken about lying in a few important respects, his main insight yields a very attractive definition of lying. Namely, you lie if and only if you say something that you do not believe and you intend to represent yourself as believing what you say. Moreover, I show that this Davidsonian definition can handle counter-examples that undercut four prominent definitions of lying: viz., the traditional intend-to-deceive definition, Thomas Carson's definition, Don Fallis's definition, and Andreas Stokke's definition

In order to lie, you have to say something that you believe to be false. But lying is not simply saying what you believe to be false. Philosophers have made several suggestions for what the additional condition might be. For example, it has been suggested that the liar has to intend to deceive (Augustine 395, Bok 1978, Mahon 2006), that she has to believe that she will deceive (Chisholm and Feehan 1977), or that she has to warrant the truth of what she says (Carson 2006). In this paper, I argue that none of the existing definitions of lying identify a necessary condition on lying. I claim that lying is saying what you believe to be false when you believe that the following norm of conversation is in effect: "Do not say what you believe to be false" (Grice 1989, 27). And I argue that this definition handles all of the counter-examples to the existing definitions

In “How to Collaborate,” Paul Thagard tries to explain why there is so much collaboration in science, and so little collaboration in philosophy, by giving an epistemic cost-benefit analysis. In this paper, I argue that an adequate explanation requires a more fully developed epistemic value theory than Thagard utilizes. In addition, I offer an alternative to Thagard’s explanation of the lack of collaboration in philosophy. He appeals to its lack of a tradition of collaboration and to the a priori nature of much philosophical research. I claim that philosophers rarely collaborate simply because they can usually get the benefits without paying the costs of actually collaborating