Premium
To Say the Least: Where Deceptively Withholding Information Ends and Lying Begins
Author(s) -
Dynel Marta
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
topics in cognitive science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.191
H-Index - 56
eISSN - 1756-8765
pISSN - 1756-8757
DOI - 10.1111/tops.12379
Subject(s) - grice , maxim , deception , meaning (existential) , epistemology , scholarship , lying , key (lock) , linguistics , psychology , sociology , pragmatics , philosophy , computer science , social psychology , law , political science , medicine , computer security , radiology
This paper aims to distil the essence of deception performed by means of withholding information, a topic hitherto largely neglected in the psychological, linguistic, and philosophical research on deception. First, the key conditions for deceptively withholding information are specified. Second, several notions related to deceptively withholding information are critically addressed with a view to teasing out the main forms of withholding information. Third, it is argued that deceptively withholding information can be conceptualized in pragmatic‐philosophical terms as being based on the violation of Grice's first maxim of Quantity, which is conducive to covertly untruthful meaning, specifically hearer‐inferred what is said that presents the violation of the first maxim of Quality. In order to meet this goal, Gricean and neo‐Gricean scholarship on the first maxim of Quantity and its consequences is revisited. Fourth, a number of linguistic realizations of withholding information are examined. It is argued that some of the examples found in the relevant scholarship, namely those that involve scalar expressions, qualify rather as lies.