From Lying to Perjury: Linguistic and Legal Perspectives on Lies and Other Falsehoods - Paperback

by Laurence R. Horn (Editor)

This volume provides new insights on lying and (intentionally) misleading in and out of the courtroom, a timely topic for scholarship and society. Not all deceptive statements are lies; not every lie under oath amounts to perjury-but what are the relevant criteria? Taxonomies of falsehood based on illocutionary force, utterance context and speakers' intentions have been debated by linguists, moral philosophers, social psychologists and cognitive scientists. Legal scholars have examined the boundary between actual perjury and garden-variety lies. The fourteen previously unpublished essays in this book apply theoretical and empirical tools to delineate the landscape of falsehood, half-truth, perjury, and verbal manipulation, including puffery, bluffing, and bullshit. The papers in this collection address conceptual and ethical aspects of lying vs. misleading and the correlation of this opposition with the Gricean pragmatic distinction between what is said and what is implicated. The questions of truth and lies addressed in this volume have long engaged the attention of scholars in linguistics, philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, organizational research, and the law, and researchers from all these fields will find this book of interest.

Back Jacket

What is the boundary between lying and "disleading" (intentionally misleading)? Is lying always ethically worse than simple deception? How does perjury differ from garden-variety lies? In these fourteen essays, distinguished linguists, philosophers, cognitive scientists, and legal scholars draw on theoretical and empirical studies, first, to map the landscape of falsehood, deception, and perjury, and second, to survey practices of manipulation from bluffing and puffery to bullshit and disinformation in courtrooms, politics, and everyday public and private life.

Author Biography

Laurence R. Horn, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA.