Departamento | Facultad de Traducción y Ciencias del Lenguaje
14/04/2026 VALENCE ASYMMETRIES SEMINAR, a càrrec de Joanna Odrowaz-Sypniewska (Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warsaw)
14/04/2026 VALENCE ASYMMETRIES SEMINAR, a càrrec de Joanna Odrowaz-Sypniewska (Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warsaw)
Date: Tuesday 14 April, 2026
Time: 12-13:30
Location: Room 52.701 (Poblenou Campus), 138 Carrer de Roc Boronat, Barcelona
Abstract:
The traditional definition of lying, dating back to St Augustine, holds that lying consists in (i) saying what you believe to be false (ii) with the intention to deceive your audience. Recently, this definition has come under pressure, most notably from the claim that bald-faced lies are genuine lies. A bald-faced lie occurs when a speaker says what they believe to be false while knowing that both they and their audience recognise its falsity. If such cases are genuine lies, the intention-to-deceive condition (ii) should arguably be abandoned. As a result, in order not to count ironic and metaphorical utterances as lies, non-deceptionists modify condition (i), claiming that lying consists in asserting what one believes to be false. They construct numerous scenarios in which people allegedly undeceptively lie, but these scenarios are ultimately inconclusive.
The talk has two parts. First, I assess a recent proposal by Skoczeń (2026), according to which lying is a dual character concept, involving both a concrete criterion (“saying what you believe to be false”) and a more abstract one (“intent to mislead the hearer and extract an unfair advantage”). Skoczeń argues that such an account might help explain the difference between the folk concept of lying and perjury. I suggest that it might also explain why we count bald-faced lies as lies. Nevertheless, I argue that this view has some unwelcome consequences and that there is a better alternative.
In the second part, I draw on an idea put forward by Coleman and Kay (1981). They argue that “lie” is a prototype concept that particular instances of lying may resemble to a greater or lesser degree. Although their proposal has largely been ignored in the recent debate, I suggest that it is well worth revisiting.
Speaker profile: https://uw.academia.
Funded by the European Union GA Nº 101142133- Valence Asymmetries