Metaphysics and Epistemology Group (Tuesday - Week 5, TT24)

Abstract: This talk considers the following question: what sorts of speech acts are political bald-faced lies (PBs)? This question is motivated by the observation that PBs don’t seem to be mere assertions, since they are false and yet they pass for truth. That is, people behave according to the lies. We provide the following answer: PBs are indirect speech acts; they are both assertions and commands. On this view, PBs pass for truth because the audience is commanded to act according to the lies, and commands have perlocutionary effect. To motivate our answer, we first consider the four core characteristics of PBs: they are necessarily implicit, group-directed, interest related, and they have particular perlocutionary effects (Melkonian-Altshuler forthcoming), characterized by speech act rules for commands. We then hypothesize a pragmatic derivation that does justice to PB’s having these characteristics. Finally, we show one way of situating this derivation within a more general theory of speech acts to strengthen our argument. In particular, we show how Asher & Lascarides’ (2001) account for indirect speech acts (ISAs) leads one to straightforwardly analyze PBs as unconventionalized, implicit indirect ISAs on a par with statements like ‘I’m out of gas.’ One virtue of our proposed analysis is that it substantiates Lynch’s (2021) claim that it’s the context that determines whether a bald-faced lie is political or not.