Lying , speech acts , and commitment

1 Not every speech act can be a lie. A good definition of lying should be able to draw 2 the right distinctions between speech acts (like promises, assertions, and oaths) that 3 can be lies and speech acts (like commands, suggestions, or assumptions) that under 4 no circumstances are lies. This paper shows that no extant account of lying is able to 5 draw the required distinctions. It argues that a definition of lying based on the notion 1 6 of ‘assertoric commitment’ can succeed where other accounts have failed. Assertoric 7 commitment is analysed in terms of two normative components: ‘accountability’ and 8 ‘discursive responsibility’. The resulting definition of lying draws all the desired dis9 tinctions, providing an intensionally adequate analysis of the concept of lying. 10

1 Condition (a) can be formulated in slightly different ways: some authors phrase it as "S says that p" (e.g. Saul 2012; Stokke 2013a), others as "S states that p" (e.g. Chisholm and Feehan 1977;Mahon 2015). I chose this formulation because it is neutral about the semantics of performative utterances, a topic discussed at length in the next section. Different formulations aside, condition (a) tracks the requirement that a locutionary act with content p must be performed, as opposed to the requirement (set by condition (d), cf. p. 3) that a specific illocutionary act (i.e. assertion) is performed. My phrasing of (a) is not meant to rule out subsentences ("For you!" indicating a letter) and elliptical signs (nodding in response to a question); I am leaving aside these complications merely for ease of exposition, as it is customary in the literature. it is just not clear how we can plausibly maintain that the speaker of (3*) is lying and 151 the speaker of (3), who undertakes even more responsibility for the same claim, is not. 152 Similar considerations apply to promises. Both by promising that you will wear a 153 blue dress at the wedding (2) and by merely announcing that you will do it (2*), you 154 create an expectation that you will show up at the wedding with a blue dress. The 155 only difference is that when you promise you take on a stronger and more explicit 156 responsibility to make it happen. Oddly, the No-Performatives View predicts that only 157 when you assume less responsibility you are lying. Mutatis mutandis, the same point 158 applies to the difference between simply stating that you have expressed consent from 159 a patient (1*) and explicitly asserting it (1). 160 8 According to descriptivism, performative utterances can at most be 'misleading'. Descriptivists will concede that with (3) the speaker can perform an indirect speech act with content (3*) (Bach and Harnish 1979, p. 208). On this view, (3) can be used to imply that the speaker saw the defendant at the crime scene, but not to directly claim it -so that (3) is at most deceptive or misleading. I discuss at length the implications of descriptivism for the lying/misleading distinction in Marsili (2016, pp.: 275-278). For more on the distinction and its importance, see e.g. Adler (1997), Saul  (4) I conjecture that (4*) the blood on the blade is Reza's 183 (5) I advise that (5*) you try that quiche 184 (6) I command that (6*) you steal that chicken 185 In the previous section, we saw that ( itions, but not both. 227 We will see that the challenge faced by deceptionist accounts applies to every other 228 definition of lying. A good definition should be able to classify explicit performatives 229 like (1-2-3) as lies, but also exclude performatives like (4-5-6), which under no 230 circumstances can be correctly classified as lies. In the next sections, I will show that 231 Footnote 9 continued if the speaker knows that there is no quiche that the hearer can try. Viebahn's view can be disputed, but I do not wish to enter the debate on presuppositional lying here. If one is moved by Viebahn's arguments, my claim should be read as follows: that (4), (5), (6) cannot be used to lie about their content (4*), (5*) and (6*), and that a good definition of lying should predict so. For the sake of simplicity, I will assume this conditional qualification as implicit throughout the paper. 10 Another 'semantic' strategy would be to argue that (4-5-6) cannot meet condition (b) because they do not possess truth-evaluable content. However, parallel problems apply. While some linguists have in fact challenged (in one way or another) the idea that every speech act possesses truth-evaluable content, what is needed here is a theory that both excludes (4-5--6) and includes (1-2-3). Proving that such a theory of content cannot be developed goes beyond the ambitions of this paper, but there are at least two reasons to suspect that this solution is not viable. First, despite the vast literature on explicit performatives, no theory that draws these distinctions has been defended before (see Recanati 2013 for an overview). Second, a plausible theory should employ either syntactic features or direction of fit to set apart performative sentences that have truth-evaluable content from those who don't, but neither of these features can be used to set apart the two groups of sentences under consideration (1-2-3 and 4-5-6) (see fn 19 for an example).  Matters are slightly more complex for 'Gricean' hybrid views, according to which a speaker S asserts that p iff S intends her audience A to accept that p at least partly on the basis of the fact that A recognises S's intention to make A accept that p (endorsed, slightly amended, by Meibauer 2005Meibauer , 2014Faulkner 2007Faulkner , 2013. Here the deception condition (c) and the assertion condition (d) impose virtually the same constraint. I will not discuss these views here because they have already been criticised at length elsewhere (e.g. Fallis 2010, 2018), but it is worth noting that (beyond known counterexamples) they will have trouble accommodating the examples discussed in Sect. 3.2 (bets, conjectures and suppositions) and in Sect. 3.4 (proviso-lies). 12 The recurring acronym "AC" will be meant to remind the reader that, for each view, I am reporting the "Assertion Condition" (d) rather than the whole definition, which includes also (a) and (b)). 13 I will not discuss Fallis' (2009) proposal: it has been shown to be incorrect, because it counts most ironical utterances as lies (Stokke 2013a, b), and was rejected by Fallis himself (2012). 14 Fallis (2012) never presents conditions (a)-(b)-(d) separately, but rather packs them together in a single sentence. Nonetheless, he is committed to ACF1 being a necessary condition for lying in addition to (a) and (b). For ease of exposition, I will ignore this complication. Although it would be a natural move, note that we cannot interpret ACF1 as appealing to Gricean communicative intentions. Gricean communication requires (broadly) that the speaker intends to make the audience believe what they say; pairing this requirement with the insincerity condition (b) amounts to reintroducing an intention to deceive condition (c). Since Fallis' project is to provide an alternative to deceptionism, this interpretation is not available. Furthermore, since Gricean definitions have been defended elsewhere (see fn 12), interpreted in this way ACF1 would no longer represent an original proposal. To be sure: another, more modestly 'Gricean' reading (according to which 'communicating' means 'expressing a belief') could work for ACF1; I discuss it in Sect. 2.3. 16 Remember that what is at stake here is whether the speaker would be lying about (4*), not about (4). As we saw in (Sect. 2.1), accepting the opposite view, according to which the proposition to be evaluated is rather (4) (descriptivism), would force us to conclude that no performative utterance can be a lie. This is incorrect: a good definition must acknowledge that (among others) explicit assertions, sworn statements and promises can be lies. to identify an alternative account that avoids their difficulties. Here the distinction between official and unofficial common grounds is less helpful.

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It is not clear how the distinction applies to (6) also implicitly promise that what they say is true.

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As I will argue in the next section, drawing the right distinctions between speech acts 393 that can and cannot be considered lies requires adopting a view along these lines-one 394 that links the act of asserting to the acceptance of a distinctive kind of responsibility. To be sure, further conditions have to obtain for (6*) to be felicitously presupposed; for instance, it should be common knowledge that stealing the chicken is physically possible. Listing them would lead us astray, and is unnecessary. As long as it is possible for these further conditions to obtain, the point stands: there are situations in which (6*) can be felicitously presupposed. 20 A referee points out that, since the embedded that-clause (6*) could be rewritten as an infinitive to-clause (I command you to steal that chicken), it could be argued that (6) has no truth-evaluable content: "to steal that chicken" is not truth-apt, and therefore cannot be believed to be false. If this is right, (6) is ruled out by every definition. I offer a response to this sort of worries in Marsili (2020a). Simply put, as anticipated in footnote 9, this manoeuvre would prove too much: also "I promise/swear/guarantee THAT ƒ" can be translated into "I promise/swear/guarantee TO ƒ", but we want to be able to count these utterances as lies.
Appealing to accounts à la Portner (2004), which differentiate between the speech acts that update the common ground and those that update to-do-lists (cf. Roberts 2012), will not help for similar reasons: both promises and commands, on this view, update to-do-lists rather than the common ground. pp. 347-348). Warrant is analysed as an implicit promise, and promises cannot be 419 mitigated or downgraded. There is no sense in which they can give a "moderately 420 strong" assurance of truth: either they guarantee that the speaker will do something, 421 or they do not. To see this, consider the difference between adding a proviso to an 422 assertion and adding a proviso to a promise: 423 (12a) I will wake up at 7AM tomorrow, but you know that I am really unreliable in 424 the morning, so don't take my word for it 425 (12b) # I promise that I will wake up at 7AM tomorrow, but you know that I am 426 really unreliable in the morning, so don't take my word for it 427 While (12a) is a mitigated assertion, (12b) is not a mitigated promise: it is not a promise 428 at all. More generally, it seems that promising that p requires an outright (as opposed 429 to "moderately strong") assurance that p is true. 21 Pace to Carson, ACC fails to capture To be sure: accounts in terms of commitment like the one that I am about propose are in a very important sense in agreement with Carson's view. Crucially, they share the idea that lying requires the assumption of a distinctive kind of responsibility. But it is equally important that they take a different stance on which kind of responsibility is involved. Note, further, that it would be incorrect to regard commitment-based proposals as mere refinements of Carson's view: commitment-based analyses of assertion represent a rich, independent tradition, whose roots go back Peirce's writings, penned at the beginning of the XXth century, about one century before Carson proposed his alternative view in terms of warrant and promises. 23 This requirement has the advantage of ruling out cases of misspeaking (Sorensen 2011) and may help to deal with some other puzzling cases (cf. Pepp 2018). Note that if philosophers are wrong, and there can be as unintentional lying, it does not follow that my definition is wrong: it just follows that some lies and assertions fall out of my envisaged explanandum. For empirical and theoretical support for the claim that unintentional lies are not lies, cf. discussion of the confused politician example in Carson (2006, p. 296) and Arico and Fallis (2013). 24 By 'non-standard' cases I mean promises like (2), and more generally assertoric speech acts about one's future actions. In Marsili (2016) I argued (both theoretically and empirically) that a promisor can be insincere (and lie) if she intends not to fulfil their promise, even if she believes that she will end up fulfilling it against her will (for instance: S promises not to ƒ, intends to ƒ at all costs, but believes that she will almost surely fail to ƒ). We need not dwell on these complications here, but the interested reader can find a definition of insincerity that makes justice to both standard and non-standard cases in Marsili  In what follows, I will use the term 'accountability' to refer, more specifically, to  26 Alston reviews different accounts of taking responsibility for the truth of a proposition (in his terminology, "R'ing"), eventually landing on a different view that, unlike the one quoted in the main text, entails that it is only permissible to assert p if p is true (cf. Alston 2000, pp. 54-64). This requirement, also endorsed by "truth-norms" of assertion (Weiner 2005; Whiting 2012) and, indirectly, by "knowledge-norms" of assertion (Williamson 1996), is one that my notion of 'accountability' carefully avoids (for reasons discussed in Marsili 2018a). Accountability, as I define it here, only has to do with downstream normativity (the normative effects of asserting p), which is to be distinguished from (the related, but distinct notion of) upstream normativity (whether you are entitled to assert that p-i.e. the kind of normativity invoked by 'norms of assertion'). For more on the irreducibility of these notions to one another, cf. Rescorla (2009a) and MacFarlane (2011). 27 The "prima facie" qualification is meant to specify that falsity only determines a defeasible right to criticise the speaker. As noted by Peirce (see above), a speaker can be excusable for asserting something false: for instance, if their false claim was uttered under coercion, or if they had excellent reasons to think that what they said was true. But excusing someone for something implies that that person was responsible for it in the first place. Prima facie accountability captures this broader notion of responsibility: that is, both that do not contradict their previous ones, or justifying their claims with adequate 498 evidence, when they are challenged to do so (cf. Brandom 1983Brandom , 1994 The commitment-based definition meets the desiderata that have been identified so 534 far. First, it differentiates between lies and other statements whose content is believed 535 to be false but that are not lies, such as ironic and metaphoric utterances. This is 536 because 'accountability' clearly does not obtain in these cases: it would be patently 537 inappropriate, for instance, to criticise an ironic or metaphoric utterance on the grounds 538 that its literal content is false. Since swearing (as in 13a) involves a stronger commitment than asserting (as in 13), 556 its utterance is said to 'illocutionarily entail' the performance of an assertion, meaning 557 that it cannot be performed without also asserting that (13*) is true. By contrast, the 558 speaker of (13b) is merely making a conjecture, which does not commit her to the

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The test for discursive responsibility draws the right distinctions here. If we were 562 to challenge (13b) with questions like "How do you know?" or "Is that true?", Peppa  31 At most, we may expect Peppa to explain why she made the conjecture, but this clearly falls short of expecting her to provide evidence that (13) is true, which is what discursive responsibility requires. After all, questions like "Why did you [performative verb] that p?" can be appropriately asked in response to virtually any speech act. Their availability is irrelevant to determining whether the speaker is committed (assertorically) to p: only the availability of challenges to the veracity of p reliably indicates that the speaker is discursively responsible for p. For more on the appropriateness of challenges to assertions, conjectures, and other assertive speech acts, see Green (2017, Sect. 2).
proviso-lies as mitigated assertions (and therefore as lies). 32 626 Lastly, my proposal seems able to draw the right distinctions about explicit perfor-627 matives. Since betting and swearing were discussed above (13a, 13b), we only need 628 to consider the following cases:

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(1) I assert that (1*) I received expressed consent from the patient

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(2) I promise that (2*) I will wear a blue dress at the wedding The predictions of the commitment-based definitions are rather straightforward 636 here. By asserting or promising that p in (1-2), the speaker becomes accountable and 637 32 A referee points out that proviso-lies like (11) do not invite belief in their unmitigated content (Mel broke your trophy), and asks whether this is compatible with generating a commitment towards that content. My answer is positive. Simply put, the proviso at most prevents the realisation of a perlocutionary effect (making the hearer believe that p), which is logically (and pragmatically) compatible with bringing about the illocutionary one (committing yourself to p). Assertors typically intend to achieve the perlocutionary goal of convincing the hearer (usually, we aim to convince our interlocutors), but they can make assertions even if they do not have this intention (Davis 1999 infelicitous because the answer is already common knowledge in the conversation. would not be an appropriate challenge. In both cases, the challenge is inappropriate, 676 because it is obvious that the challenger already knows the answer to the question, 677 so that considering its availability is irrelevant to determining whether the speaker is 678 committed to the proposition. 34 679 33 I defend this claim in more detail in Marsili (2016, pp. 277-278). 34 Although these distinctions will do for our present purposes, a further clarification may be of interest, if only to resolve apparent terminological inconsistencies. In Marsili (2018b) I consider these issues in more the speaker is assertorically committed to the relevant proposition, so that they still 685 constitute a reliable test for discursive responsibility. And the latter questions are 686 clearly available in response to (2), showing that also in this case the speaker is bound 687 by the relevant discursive obligations. In addition to this, in (2) also 'accountability' 688 clearly obtains: if I eventually wear a red dress to the wedding, I can be criticised for

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(2*) being false, and appropriately so. The right verdict is thus given also in the case 690 of insincere promises.

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It seems that the proposed account avoids all the counterexamples that affect other  Footnote 34 continued depth, and differentiate between a challenge being inappropriate (which depends on whether the answer to the challenge is already in the common ground) and illegitimate (which depends on whether the speaker was committed to p in the first place). Only when a challenge is 'illegitimate' we have evidence that the speaker is not discursively responsible for p. Of course, challenges to promises like (2) are only 'inappropriate' in this sense, whereas challenges to non-assertoric acts like (6) or (8) are genuinely 'illegitimate'.