Brian Haas

Does lying require an intention to deceive? Deceptionists answer 'Yes', while Non-Deceptionists answer 'No'. Non-Deceptionists point to a host of purported counterexamples in support of their position. Deceptionists are left unconvinced. By forging a stronger link between the lying and action-theoretic literatures, I offer a new argument against the Deceptionist position. One that must be responded to differently if it is to be countenanced by Deceptionists. I conclude by advancing a promising middle ground between these two positions.

Are slurring statements, when applied to members of the slurred group, true, false, or a little bit of both? Intuitions are mixed. And investigating more truth-value judgments is unlikely to cure the stalemate we find ourselves in. Truth-value judgments are just not up to the task. In their place, I propose we look to judgments of lying instead. This change in focus provides a new and better tool for understanding the complex semantics and pragmatics of slurs. As I argue, it also suggests that slurring statements encode, conventionally implicate and presuppose the same information as statements with the slur's neutral counterpart. I then briefly apply this style of argument to the semantics and pragmatics of evaluative language more generally.

Sam Berstler has recently argued for a fairness-based moral difference between lying and misleading. According to Berstler, the liar, but not the misleader, unfairly free rides on the Lewisian conventions which ground public-language meaning. Although compelling, the pragmatic and metasemantic backdrop within which this moral reason is located allows for the generation of a vicious explanatory circle. Simply, this backdrop entails that no speaker has ever performed an assertion. As I argue, escaping the circle requires rejecting Berstler’s fairness-based reason against lying. The problem is a general one: the wrong of lying cannot be founded on the goods of language.