2020/03/22 by Vladimir Krstić
Arts and Humanities · Neuroscience · Psychology · #Deception detection and forensic psychology #Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics #Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment
paper · doi:10.1080/09515089.2020.1743255
openalex publication_date 2020/03/22 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
In their paper published in 2017 in Philosophical Psychology, Ronja Rutschmann and Alex Wiegmann introduce a novel kind of lies, the indifferent lies. According to them, these lies are not intended to deceive simply because the liars do not care whether their audience is going to believe them or not. It seems as if indifferent lies avoid the objections raised against other kinds of lies supposedly not intended to deceive. I argue that this is not correct. Indifferent lies, too, are either intended to deceive or are not lies at all, since they do not involve genuine assertions.