ABSTRACT

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 truth-warranting context) but does not really care about whether the addressee believes what she says. Krstić (2019) argues that in such cases, the speaker deceives the addressee intentionally and, therefore, indifferent lies do not show that lying does not require an intention to deceive. While we agree that the speaker deceives the addressee intentionally, we resist Krstić’s conclusion by pointing out that there is a difference between deceiving intentionally and intending to deceive. To this aim, we presented 268 participants with a new variant of an indifferent lie and asked whether the speaker lied, whether she had an intention to deceive, and whether she deceived intentionally. Whereas the majority of participants considered the speaker to have deceived the addressee intentionally, most denied that the speaker had an intention to deceive the addressee. Hence, indifferent lies still challenge widely accepted definitions of lying.

摘要

有人提出了冷漠的谎言作为对谎言要求欺骗意图的说法的反例。在冷漠的谎言中，说话者说了一些她认为是虚假的话（在保证真相的情况下），但实际上并不在乎收件人是否相信她的话。Krstić（2019）认为，在这种情况下，说话人故意欺骗收件人，因此，冷漠的谎言并不表明说谎并不需要欺骗的意图。尽管我们同意说话人故意欺骗收件人，但我们指出，故意欺骗和意图欺骗之间存在差异，因此我们抵制了克尔斯蒂奇的结论。为此，我们向268位参与者展示了一种无动于衷的谎言的新变种，并询问演讲者是否撒谎，她是否有欺骗意图，以及她是否故意欺骗。尽管大多数参与者认为发言人是故意欺骗收件人，但大多数与会者却否认发言人有意图欺骗收件人。因此，冷漠的谎言仍在挑战被广泛接受的说谎定义。