LYING IS A KIND OF DECEPTION / (MENTIRA É UM TIPO DE ENGANAÇÃO)

Under the traditional view of lying, the concept is usually taken to be a deviant speech act with the following characteristics: (1) being insincere and (2) being done with the intention to deceive. On the recent literature, however, (2) has come under attack by a class of counter examples that purport to show that the traditional view has been misguided. In this essay, our objective is twofold, we intend to: (a) present Lackey’s defense of her take on the traditional conception; (b) present a different proposal about how to go about defending (2). This is important because, although we don’t agree with Lackey’s solution, we do agree that (2) is a necessary condition on a successful definition of lying, as evidenced by the fact that taking the deception clause out of [lying] leaves us with an overall loss of explanatory power with regards to a range of speech acts and the general ethics of communicative cooperation.