What counts as a lie in and out of the courtroom? The effect of discourse genre on lie judgments
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Benjamin Weissman
Abstract
A statement can be technically true but carry a false implicature which, if it were said explicitly, would meet all the criteria of a lie. Much of the literature has discussed whether a statement like this can be a lie: either it cannot, since the false content isn’t literally said, or is just as much of a lie as its literally-said counterpart. This chapter explores whether situational context can have any effect on the perception of such statements, specifically investigating the effects of discourse genre. The experiment probes whether judgments of false generalized and particularized conversational implicatures as lies change based on the setting and standards of discourse of the interaction. Several different stories were manipulated to fit three different contexts - a witness testifying under oath in a courtroom, a politician giving a public address, or a casual conversation between two friends. Results indicate that participants judged false GCIs to be less of a lie when coming from a witness testifying under oath in a courtroom. On average, GCIs in all contexts were rated precisely at the midpoint between a lie and not a lie, while PCIs were treated as not lies. These results are discussed further with respect to the standards of discourse in a courtroom scenario and how those standards encourage people to adopt more literal utterance interpretations than they would in a different context. The present study also connects to theories of linguistic meaning and commitment in order to account for the nuances in the evaluation of false implicatures as lies.
Abstract
A statement can be technically true but carry a false implicature which, if it were said explicitly, would meet all the criteria of a lie. Much of the literature has discussed whether a statement like this can be a lie: either it cannot, since the false content isn’t literally said, or is just as much of a lie as its literally-said counterpart. This chapter explores whether situational context can have any effect on the perception of such statements, specifically investigating the effects of discourse genre. The experiment probes whether judgments of false generalized and particularized conversational implicatures as lies change based on the setting and standards of discourse of the interaction. Several different stories were manipulated to fit three different contexts - a witness testifying under oath in a courtroom, a politician giving a public address, or a casual conversation between two friends. Results indicate that participants judged false GCIs to be less of a lie when coming from a witness testifying under oath in a courtroom. On average, GCIs in all contexts were rated precisely at the midpoint between a lie and not a lie, while PCIs were treated as not lies. These results are discussed further with respect to the standards of discourse in a courtroom scenario and how those standards encourage people to adopt more literal utterance interpretations than they would in a different context. The present study also connects to theories of linguistic meaning and commitment in order to account for the nuances in the evaluation of false implicatures as lies.
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Frontmatter I
- Contents VII
- Introduction: On lying and disleading 1
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I Lies and deception: The landscape of falsehood
- Lying, deception, and related concepts: A conceptual map for ethics 15
- The morality of deception 41
- Kant tell an a priori lie 65
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II Lying, deception, and speaker commitment: Empirical evidence
- Is lying morally different from misleading? An empirical investigation 89
- “I was only quoting”: Shifting viewpoint and speaker commitment 113
- Memefying deception and deceptive memefication: Multimodal deception on social media 139
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III Puffery, bluffery, bullshit: How to not quite lie
- Bald-faced bullshit and authoritarian political speech: Making sense of Johnson and Trump 165
- Practice to deceive: A natural history of the legal bluff 195
- Just saying, just kidding: Liability for accountability-avoiding speech in ordinary conversation, politics and law 227
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IV Crossing the perjury threshold: Deceit and falsehood in the courtroom
- Perjury cases and the linguist 261
- Trickery and deceit: How the pragmatics of interrogation leads innocent people to confess – and factfinders to believe their confessions 289
- The context of mistrust: Perjury ascriptions in the courtroom 309
- What counts as a lie in and out of the courtroom? The effect of discourse genre on lie judgments 353
- Lies, deception, and bullshit in law 381
- Index 409
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Frontmatter I
- Contents VII
- Introduction: On lying and disleading 1
-
I Lies and deception: The landscape of falsehood
- Lying, deception, and related concepts: A conceptual map for ethics 15
- The morality of deception 41
- Kant tell an a priori lie 65
-
II Lying, deception, and speaker commitment: Empirical evidence
- Is lying morally different from misleading? An empirical investigation 89
- “I was only quoting”: Shifting viewpoint and speaker commitment 113
- Memefying deception and deceptive memefication: Multimodal deception on social media 139
-
III Puffery, bluffery, bullshit: How to not quite lie
- Bald-faced bullshit and authoritarian political speech: Making sense of Johnson and Trump 165
- Practice to deceive: A natural history of the legal bluff 195
- Just saying, just kidding: Liability for accountability-avoiding speech in ordinary conversation, politics and law 227
-
IV Crossing the perjury threshold: Deceit and falsehood in the courtroom
- Perjury cases and the linguist 261
- Trickery and deceit: How the pragmatics of interrogation leads innocent people to confess – and factfinders to believe their confessions 289
- The context of mistrust: Perjury ascriptions in the courtroom 309
- What counts as a lie in and out of the courtroom? The effect of discourse genre on lie judgments 353
- Lies, deception, and bullshit in law 381
- Index 409
