Abstract
This note responds to criticism put forth by Jessica Keiser against a theory of lying as Stalnakerian assertion. According to this account, to lie is to say something one believes to be false and thereby propose that it become common ground. Keiser objects that this view wrongly counts particular kinds of non-literal speech as instances of lying. In particular, Keiser argues that the view invariably counts metaphors and certain uses of definite descriptions as lies. It is argued here that both these claims are false.
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Notes
See Stokke (2013). Keiser (2016, Sect. 5.2) who summarizes the common ground view of assertion as the claim that “S asserts p iff in stating p S proposes to add p to the common ground.” This is a stronger view of assertion than the one employed in my account of lying, i.e., the view given by (A1)–(A2). However, I want to show that, even ignoring this, my view does not have the undesirable consequences Keiser points to.
The main reason for this is the desiredatum to count as genuine lies cases of lying without the intent to deceive, so called “bald-faced lies.” See Stokke (2013) for discussion.
See Stalnaker (2002, p. 716).
The fact that metaphorical meaning survives embeddings—as in this case, under attitudes—is one major piece of evidence against the Gricean view of metaphors as cases of (particularized) conversational implicatures. As noted, if the Gricean view is wrong, my view of lying has an even easier time not counting all metaphorical utterances as lies.
On a Russellian view of definite descriptions, an utterance of “the man drinking a martini” asserts that there is a unique (salient) man drinking a martini. Hence, on such a view, it is harder to avoid the result that all utterances like Alice's utterance of (5) are lies. However, I take it that there are sufficient, independent reasons for rejecting a Russellian view of definite descriptions in favor of a presuppositional view. For recent discussion, see, e.g., Heim and Kratzer (1998), Elbourne (2005, 2010), Schoubye (2009, 2013), Glanzberg (2007), Kripke (2005).
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I am grateful to Don Fallis for helpful comments and suggestions.
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Stokke, A. Metaphors and Martinis: a response to Jessica Keiser. Philos Stud 174, 853–859 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0709-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0709-0