Lying and Insincerity

We routinely engage in untruthfulness in all spheres of life so the line between lying and merely misleading is often blurred. Lying and Insincerity is a comprehensive study of lying and insincere language use. People will speak insincerely in many ways beyond outright lying, perhaps saying things they don’t believe without aiming to make anyone else believe them, or asking questions without caring for the answers. In order to understand the consequences of such uses of language, we need to understand how they link up with the speaker’s state of mind and how they can be used to deceive and mislead. Stokke discusses the nature of such speech from the point of view of contemporary philosophy, presenting a theory of how lying relates to other forms of insincerity, and detailing the attitudes that go with insincere uses of language.