•  1
    Lying, Fake News, and Bullshit (edited book)
    Bloomsbury. forthcoming.
  •  13
    Can a question be a lie? An empirical investigation
    with Emanuel Viebahn, Neele Engelmann, and Pascale Willemsen
    Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 8 (7). 2021.
    In several recent papers and a monograph, Andreas Stokke argues that questions can be misleading, but that they cannot be lies. The aim of this paper is to show that ordinary speakers disagree. We show that ordinary speakers judge certain kinds of insincere questions to be lies, namely questions carrying a believed-false presupposition the speaker intends to convey. These judgements are robust and remain so when the participants are given the possibility of classifying the utterances as misleadi…Read more
  •  9
    Introduction
    In Pascale Willemsen & Alex Wiegmann (eds.), Advances in Experimental Philosophy, . pp. 1-5. 2022.
  •  11
    Does lying require objective falsity?
    Synthese 202 (2): 1-21. 2023.
    Does lying require objective falsity? Given that consistency with ordinary language is a desideratum of a philosophical definition of lying, empirical evidence plays an important role. A literature review reveals that studies employing a simple question-and-response format, such as “Did the speaker lie? [Yes/No]”, favour the subjective view of lying, according to which objective falsity is not required. However, it has recently been claimed that the rate of lie attributions found in those studie…Read more
  •  33
    Arguing about thought experiments
    Synthese 201 (6): 1-23. 2023.
    We investigate the impact of informal arguments on judgments about thought experiment cases in light of Deutsch and Cappelen’s mischaracterization view, which claims that philosophers’ case judgments are primarily based on arguments and not intuitions. If arguments had no influence on case judgments, this would seriously challenge whether they are, or should be, based on arguments at all—and not on other cognitive sources instead, such as intuition. In Experiment 1, we replicated Wysocki’s (Rev …Read more
  •  252
    Intuitive expertise and intuitions about knowledge
    Philosophical Studies 173 (10): 2701-2726. 2016.
    Experimental restrictionists have challenged philosophers’ reliance on intuitions about thought experiment cases based on experimental findings. According to the expertise defense, only the intuitions of philosophical experts count—yet the bulk of experimental philosophy consists in studies with lay people. In this paper, we argue that direct strategies for assessing the expertise defense are preferable to indirect strategies. A direct argument in support of the expertise defense would have to s…Read more
  •  279
    In recent years, a number of philosophers have conducted empirical studies that survey people's intuitions about various subject matters in philosophy. Some have found that intuitions vary accordingly to seemingly irrelevant facts: facts about who is considering the hypothetical case, the presence or absence of certain kinds of content, or the context in which the hypothetical case is being considered. Our research applies this experimental philosophical methodology to Judith Jarvis Thomson's fa…Read more
  •  8
    Correction to: Empirically Investigating the Concept of Lying
    with Ronja Rutschmann and Pascale Willemsen
    Journal of the Indian Council of Philosophical Research 35 (1): 223-223. 2018.
    The funding information is missing in the original article. It is given below.
  •  36
    Empirically Investigating the Concept of Lying
    with Ronja Rutschmann and Pascale Https://Orcidorg Willemsen
    Journal of the Indian Council of Philosophical Research 34 (3): 591-609. 2017.
    Lying is an everyday moral phenomenon about which philosophers have written a lot. Not only the moral status of lying has been intensively discussed but also what it means to lie in the first place. Perhaps the most important criterion for an adequate definition of lying is that it fits with people’s understanding and use of this concept. In this light, it comes as a surprise that researchers only recently started to empirically investigate the folk concept of lying. In this paper, we describe t…Read more
  •  16
    In this paper we develop test cases to adjudicate between dual-process and the causal mapping explanations of order effects. Using dilemmas with minimized emotional force, we explore new conditions for order effects to occur. Overall, the results support causal model theory. We produced novel evidence that order effects extend not only to cases with low emotional engagement, but also to specialized judgments about whether an action violates a rule. However, when objects are sacrificed instead of…Read more
  •  18
    In this paper, we report the results of three high-powered replication studies in experimental philosophy, which bear on an alleged instability of folk philosophical intuitions: the purported susceptibility of epistemic intuitions about the Truetemp case (Lehrer, Theory of knowledge. Westview Press, Boulder, 1990) to order effects. Evidence for this susceptibility was first reported by Swain et al. (Philos Phenomenol Res 76(1):138–155, 2008); further evidence was then found in two studies by Wri…Read more
  •  14
    Lying, Deceptive Implicatures, and Commitment
    with Pascale Willemsen and Jörg Meibauer
    Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 8 (n/a). 2021.
    Deceptive implicatures are a subtle communicative device for leading someone into a false belief. However, it is widely accepted that deceiving by means of deceptive implicature does not amount to lying. In this paper, we put this claim to the empirical test and present evidence that the traditional definition of lying might be too narrow to capture the folk concept of lying. Four hundred participants were presented with fourteen vignettes containing utterances that communicate conversational im…Read more
  •  30
    Theorists in the debate on how to define lying disagree whether it is possible to lie with pictures. At the same time, they agree that definitions of lying should be consistent with how laypersons use the term ‘lie’. This calls for an empirical perspective on whether ordinary usage allows for pictorial lies. The present paper provides some initial data on this question by reporting an experiment with 623 participants investigating layperson judgements about cases of insincere linguistic and pict…Read more
  •  43
    Does lying require a speaker to explicitly express something (she believes to be) false, or is it also possible to lie with deceptive implicatures? Given that consistency with ordinary language is a desideratum of any philosophical definition of lying, several studies have addressed this question empirically in recent years. Their findings, however, seem to be in conflict. This paper reports an experiment with 222 participants that investigates the hypothesis that these conflicting results are d…Read more
  •  248
    We conducted two experiments to determine whether common folk think that so-called _tell-tale sign_ bald-faced lies are intended to deceive—since they have not been tested before. These lies involve tell-tale signs (e.g. blushing) that show that the speaker is lying. Our study was designed to avoid problems earlier studies raise (these studies focus on a kind of bald-faced lie in which supposedly everyone knows that what the speaker says is false). Our main hypothesis was that the participants w…Read more
  •  29
    Lying Without Saying Something False? A Cross-Cultural Investigation of the Folk Concept of Lying in Russian and English Speakers
    with Louisa M. Reins, Olga P. Marchenko, and Irina Schumski
    Review of Philosophy and Psychology 14 (2): 735-762. 2023.
    The present study examines cross-cultural differences in people’s concept of lying with regard to the question of whether lying requires an agent to _say_ something they believe to be false. While prominent philosophical views maintain that lying entails that a person explicitly expresses a believed-false claim, recent research suggests that people’s concept of lying might also include certain kinds of deception that are communicated more indirectly. An important drawback of previous empirical w…Read more
  •  45
    True lies and Moorean redundancy
    Synthese 199 (5-6): 13053-13066. 2021.
    According to the subjective view of lying, speakers can lie by asserting a true proposition, as long as they believe this proposition to be false. This view contrasts with the objective view, according to which lying requires the actual falsity of the proposition asserted. The aim of this paper is to draw attention to pairs of assertions that differ only in intuitively redundant content and to show that such pairs of assertions are a reason to favour the subjective view of lying over the objecti…Read more
  •  21
    Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Causation (edited book)
    Advances in Experimental Philo. 2022.
    What is the connection between causation and responsibility? Is there a best way to theorize philosophically about causation? Which factors determine and influence what we judge to be the cause of something? Bringing together interdisciplinary research from experimental philosophy, traditional philosophy and psychology, this collection showcases the most recent developments and approaches to questions about causation. Chapters discuss the diverse theoretical ramifications of empirical findings i…Read more
  •  97
    Intuitive Expertise in Moral Judgments
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 100 (2): 342-359. 2022.
    According to the ‘expertise defence’, experimental findings suggesting that intuitive judgments about hypothetical cases are influenced by philosophically irrelevant factors do not undermine their evidential use in (moral) philosophy. This defence assumes that philosophical experts are unlikely to be influenced by irrelevant factors. We discuss relevant findings from experimental metaphilosophy that largely tell against this assumption. To advance the debate, we present the most comprehensive ex…Read more
  •  56
    Lying is an important moral phenomenon that most people are affected by on a daily basis—be it in personal relationships, in political debates, or in the form of fake news. Nevertheless, surprisingly little is known about what actually constitutes a lie. According to the traditional definition of lying, a person lies if they explicitly express something they believe to be false. Consequently, it is often assumed that people cannot lie by more indirectly communicating believed‐false claims, for i…Read more
  •  115
    Folk intuitions about reference change and the causal theory of reference
    Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 8 (25). 2022.
    In this paper, we present and discuss the findings of two experiments about reference change. Cases of reference change have sometimes been invoked to challenge traditional versions of semantic externalism, but the relevant cases have never been tested empirically. The experiments we have conducted use variants of the famous Twin Earth scenario to test folk intuitions about whether natural kind terms such as ‘water’ or ‘salt’ switch reference after being constantly (mis)applied to different kind…Read more
  •  27
    Intending to deceive versus deceiving intentionally in indifferent lies
    with Ronja Rutschmann
    Philosophical Psychology 33 (5): 752-756. 2020.
    Indifferent lies have been proposed as a counterexample to the claim that lying requires an intention to deceive. In indifferent lies, the speaker says something she believes to be false (in a trut...
  •  97
    Assertions are our standard communicative tool for sharing and acquiring information. Recent empirical studies seemingly provide converging evidence that assertions are subject to a factive norm: you are entitled to assert a proposition p only if p is true. All these studies, however, assume that we can treat participants' judgments about what an agent 'should say' as evidence of their intuitions about assertability. This paper argues that this assumption is incorrect, so that the conclusions dr…Read more
  •  77
    The folk concept of lying
    with Jörg Meibauer
    Philosophy Compass 14 (8). 2019.
    Lying is a familiar and important concept for virtually all of us, and philosophers have written a lot about what it means to lie. Although it is commonly accepted that an adequate definition of lying captures people's use and understanding of this concept, there have been surprisingly few empirical studies on it. n recent years, however, there is a trend emerging to remedy this lacuna. In this paper, we provide an overview of these studies. Starting from a widely accepted philosophical definiti…Read more
  •  26
    Moral judgment
    with Michael R. Waldmann and Jonas Nagel
    The Oxford Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning. 2012.
    The past decade has seen a renewed interest in moral psychology. A unique feature of the present endeavor is its unprecedented interdisciplinarity. For the first time, cognitive, social, and developmental psychologists, neuroscientists, experimental philosophers, evolutionary biologists, and anthropologists collaborate to study the same or overlapping phenomena. This review focuses on moral judgments and is written from the perspective of cognitive psychologists interested in theories of the cog…Read more
  •  53
    Lying despite telling the truth
    with Jana Samland and Michael R. Waldmann
    Cognition 150 (C): 37-42. 2016.
  •  82
    No need for an intention to deceive? Challenging the traditional definition of lying
    with Ronja Rutschmann
    Philosophical Psychology 30 (4): 438-457. 2017.
    According to the traditional definition of lying, somebody lies if he or she makes a believed-false statement with the intention to deceive. The traditional definition has recently been challenged by non-deceptionists who use bald-faced lies to underpin their view that the intention to deceive is no necessary condition for lying. We conducted two experiments to test whether their assertions are true. First, we presented one of five scenarios that consisted of three different kinds of lies. Then …Read more