RATIO Special Issue December 2020 DOI 10.1111/rati.12268 Disagreement with a bald-faced liar Teresa Marques Department of Philosophy Universitat de Barcelona C/ Montalegre 6-9, 08003 Barcelona, Spain Correspondence Teresa Marques, Department of Philosophy, Universitat de Barcelona, C/ Montalegre 69, 08003 Barcelona, Spain Email: teresamatosferreira@ub.edu Abstract How can we disagree with a bald-faced liar? Can we actively disagree if it is common ground that the speaker has no intent to deceive? And why do we disapprove of bald-faced liars so strongly? Bald-faced lies pose problems for accounts of lying and of assertion. Recent proposals try to defuse those problems by arguing that bald-faced lies are not really assertions, but rather performances of fiction-like scripts, or different types of language games. In this paper, I raise two objections to the fictionalist view, and then offer an analysis of how we disagree with bald-faced liars. I conclude that bald-faced lies are assertions, and that in pronouncing a bald-faced lie, the speaker tries to make it common ground that the assertion was in good standing qua assertion. Keywords Assertion, bald-faced lies, context update, disagreement, lies Funding information This work was supported by projects DIAPHORA Marie Curie ITN (H2020-MSCAITN-2015-675415) of the European Commission, projects FFI2015-73767-JIN and FFI2016-80588-R of the Spanish Science Ministry. 1 INTRODUCTION A dictionary definition of a bare or bald-faced lie has it that it is a falsehood 'told with utter confidence without trying to conceal the fact that it is false, especially a planned or deliberate falsehood'1 How can we disagree with a bald-faced liar? Answering this question is important to understand what lying is, why it is morally wrong, and to gain a better understanding of disagreement. It is also practically important in the current political climate. In an article from early 2019, Dahlia Lithwick reported evidence that Donald Trump directed his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, to lie to congress regarding negotiations to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. The allegation was supported by substantial documentation collected in Robert Mueller's report, and later confirmed by Cohen. Faced with strong documentary evidence and Cohen's testimony, Trump 1 Definition online from Your Dictionary: https://www.yourdictionary.com/barefaced-lie (accessed December 2019). 2 accused Cohen of being 'a lying liar' and said that the evidence in Mueller's report was 'fake.' These claims by Trump are, arguably, bald-faced lies, and, as Lithwick says, they have effects on journalism, politics, and society: We've grown so hopelessly accustomed to a journalism reduced to daily fact checking, and a politics reduced to daily fact checking, and fact checking reduced to daily white noise that we forget that there is more to daily public life than endlessly correcting the record. (Lithwick, 2019. My emphasis) Sorensen (2007) has argued, provocatively, that bald-faced lies do not deserve moral disapproval: If it is common ground that an assertion that p is false, then surely the bald-faced liar does not intend to deceive his audience about p (since they take for granted that it is false). And if the speaker does not intend to deceive the audience about p, then bald-faced lies should not be reprehensible. The fact that we do tend to morally disapprove of bald-faced lies should be a mere 'rhetorical illusion.' Bald-faced lies seem to pose problems for some accounts of lying and for some theories of assertion but it is not commonly recognized that bald-faced lies are also a problem for accounts of disagreement. If it is common ground that a bald-faced lie is false, and that the speaker has no intention to deceive, then disagreement with the baldfaced liar should not be possible. However, as we will see, these disagreements seem to exist – endlessly trying to correct the record is surely one way of them arising. Moreover, Sorensen's claim that our disapproval of a bald-faced liar is a 'rhetorical illusion' does not sit comfortably with our condemnation, for instance, of Donald Trump's lie on 4 January 2019: 'I never said I was going to build a concrete wall.' Faced with the problem of categorizing bald-faced lies, theorists have mostly adopted one of two strategies. Either they insist, flying in the face of first-appearances and disregarding Sorensen's argument, that any bald-faced lie that p intends to deceive about p.2 Alternatively, they argue that the intention to deceive regarding p is not essential to lying.3 Here I discuss a third possibility: that bald-faced lies are not lies because they are not assertions. This view is defended by Jessica Keiser (2016) and Ishani Maitra (2018). Keiser claims that bald-faced 'liars' are in fact engaging in various language-games that do not amount to conversations. Meanwhile, Maitra argues for a constitutive view of assertion, where to assert is to be responsive to evidence in the right way. Bald-faced liars violate this constitutive rule so blatantly that they must be doing something else. Maitra's hypothesis is that they are more like actors following a script. I will call these kinds of view fictionalism about bald-faced lies. I have two principal aims in this paper. The first is to give two objections to fictionalism about bald-faced lies. The objections affect the fictionalist view, and show that bald-faced lies are assertions. My second aim is to show that this fact can explain how we disagree with bald-faced liars, and how these liars often undermine their audiences' epistemic assurance, i.e., gaslight their audiences. It is because bald-faced lies are assertions made 'with utter confidence and without trying to conceal' their falsehood that they impose asserted falsehoods on context. Getting away with a baldfaced lie is a form of dominating conversational contexts. I hence disagree with Sorensen's conclusion: the blatant imposition of an asserted falsehood on context deserves moral disapproval. 2 E.g., Lackey (2013). I'm not persuaded by her distinction between deceiving and being deceptive. For discussion, see Fallis (2015). 3 E.g., Sorensen (2007), Carson (2006, 2010), Fallis (2009), Saul (2012), Stokke (2013). 3 In Section 2, I introduce examples of bald-faced lies, and set up the background and motivation for fictionalism about them. Section 3 offers two objections to fictionalism. In Section 4, I sketch the illocutionary and perlocutionary effects of baldfaced lies which can help explain how they gaslight their audiences, and also how we can disagree with bald-faced liars. 2 BALD-FACED LIES: CASES, ASSERTIONS, AND FICTION-MAKING There are familiar cases normally used to illustrate the main features of bald-faced lies. The cases raise problems for theories of lying and of assertion. Here, I present three of such cases, all of which prima facie reveal a lack of intent to deceive the audience about what is literally said in the bald-faced lie.4 2.1 Bald-faced lies: examples There are numerous examples of bald-faced lies from real life and from fiction. The first case below is from the film The Godfather 2, the second is from Åsne Seierstad's reporting from Iraq before the fall of Saddam Hussein, and the final is a made-up philosophical example. Case 1: Frankie Five Angels 'Frankie Five Angels' Pantangelli is called in as a surprise witness in a senate hearing to testify against the mob boss Michael Corleone. Frankie, who had fallen out with Michael, was under government protection and had made an agreement with government officials to tell the court of the manifold crimes for which Michael was responsible. In order to prevent this, Michael flies Frankie's brother Vincenzo-mafioso and caretaker of Frankie's children-over from Sicily to attend the hearings. On the day of the hearing, Frankie turns around and locks eyes with Vincenzo, whose presence reminds him that by testifying against Michael he puts the honour of his family as well as the wellbeing of his children at risk. Subsequently, Frankie surprises the government officials by going against their agreement and claiming under oath to have no knowledge of any wrongdoings committed by Michael Corleone. This is a paradigmatic example of a bald-faced lie in which there is no intent to deceive; there is mutual knowledge among the hearing attendees that Michael is guilty of murder, etc., and that Frankie has first-hand knowledge of these facts. (Keiser, 2016, p. 462) Case 2: Takhlef 'Everything [President Saddam Hussein] did in the past was good and everything he will do in the future is good' (Seierstad, 2003, p. 30). 'How can you be so sure about that?' Åsne Seierstad asks her Iraqi minder. With a glare Takhlef answers 'I know it as a result of my belief in the party and his leadership.' Åsne Seierstad does not press Takhlef. She does not want to join the many reporters expelled from Iraq. Instead of voicing her disgust at the overwhelming number of Saddam Hussein portraits, she makes flattering remarks about the President's appearance... Everybody realizes that Takhlef's description of Saddam Hussein's performance is a lie. Everybody knows 4 I do not consider 'polite untruths': falsifications that are not lies. See Shiffrin (2014); see also Mahon (2015), Isenberg (1964, p. 473). These cases can be characterized as indirect assertions, see GarcíaCarpintero (2019). By contrast, in bald-faced lies there is no plausible indirectly asserted truth. 4 Takhlef is lying and everybody knows everyone knows it. If lying requires an intention to deceive, then common knowledge that Takhlef is lying is impossible. (Sorensen, 2007, pp. 251-252) Case 3: Cheating student Suppose that a college Dean is cowed whenever he fears that someone might threaten a law suit and has a firm, but unofficial, policy of never upholding a professor's charge that a student cheated on an exam unless the student confesses in writing to having cheated. The Dean is very cynical about this and believes that students are guilty whenever they are charged. A student is caught in the act of cheating on an exam by copying from a crib sheet. The professor fails the student for the course and the student appeals the professor's decision to the Dean who has the ultimate authority to assign the grade. The student is privy to information about the Dean's de facto policy and, when called before the Dean, he (the student) affirms that he didn't cheat on the exam... The student says this on the record in an official proceeding and thereby warrants the truth of statements he knows to be false. He intends to avoid punishment by doing this. He may have no intention of deceiving the Dean that he didn't cheat. (Carson, 2006, p. 290) All cases involve common knowledge that what the speaker says is false. It also seems, as Sorensen says, that in these cases our ordinary intuitions tell us that the speaker is lying: 'Everybody knows that Takhlef is lying and everybody knows everybody knows it.' 2.2 Theoretical decisions about lying, asserting, disagreeing Prima facie, bald-faced lies are a problem for some theories of assertion, for instance for so-called communicative intention theories, a family of views where to assert is to express one's belief with the intention that the hearer acquire that same belief. Take for example Bach and Harnish's reflexive communicative intention account: S asserts that p iff S expresses (i) the belief that p, and (ii) the intention that H believe that p. (Bach and Harnish, 1979, p. 42)5 Bald-faced lies pose a problem for such theories because the bald-faced liar does not seem to have the intention that the hearer come to believe that p. After all, in the cases above, it is taken for granted by speaker and hearers that what is asserted is false; and the speaker has no intention to bring about the belief that the assertion is true. Bald-faced lies do not appear to raise problems for other accounts of assertion, for instance Stalnaker's,6 or Williamson's.7 According to Williamson, assertion is 5 See Pagin (2014) for discussion. There are other reasons to reject communicative intentions theories of assertion. See Sperber and Wilson (1986, pp. 256–7), for criticism of Bach and Harnish's reflexive intention view. It is not the aim of this paper to rehearse the reasons for and against various theories; for present purposes, it suffices that bald-faced lies raise problems for communicative intention theories, but not for constitutive rule accounts. 6 Stalnaker (1999, 2002). 7 Williamson (1996). 5 regulated by constitutive rules, which are distinct from other norms that may apply to them (of relevance, politeness, etc.) That constitutive rule must differentiate assertion from other speech acts to which the more general cooperative norms also apply. Now, the violation of a constitutive rule for an action type does not mean that the action was not performed. When one breaks a rule of a game, one does not thereby cease to be playing that game. When one breaks a rule of a language, one does not thereby cease to be speaking that language; speaking English ungrammatically is speaking English. Likewise, presumably, for a speech act: when one breaks a rule of assertion, one does not thereby fail to make an assertion. One is subject to criticism precisely because one has performed an act for which the rule is constitutive (Williamson, 1996, p. 491) It should not be controversial that breaking the rules of a game is compatible with playing it. In the 1986 football World Cup quarter-final, Maradona scored a goal with a hand (not a foot), and joked about the interference of the hand of God. Williamson argues that assertion in particular is regulated by the knowledge rule (KR): (KR) One must: assert p only if one knows that p. Nonetheless, bald-faced lies do not pose a problem for Williamson's account, although they blatantly violate (KR): not only does the speaker not know that p, this fact is common knowledge. Meanwhile, according to Stalnaker's account of assertion, to assert that p is to propose that p become common ground: It is common ground that φ in a group if all members accept (for the purpose of the conversation) that φ, and all believe that all accept that φ, and all believe that all believe that all accept that φ, etc. (Stalnaker, 2002, p. 716) Acceptance is a belief-like attitude, although not necessarily a belief. It might be an assumption, or a mere 'acceptance for the purposes of an argument or inquiry': To accept a proposition is to treat it as true for some reason. One ignores, at least temporarily, and perhaps in a limited context, the possibility that it is false. (Stalnaker, 2002, p. 716) Stokke (2013) deploys Stalnaker's account to define lying, and in a way that can accommodate bald-faced lies. He claims that to lie is to assert what one believes to be false.8 The bald-faced liar who asserts p wants p to be added to the common ground, even though the audience doesn't believe p. In the next section, I will suggest that we should nonetheless doubt the Stalnakerian notion of assertion. For now, what is important is that this account abandons the intention to deceive, which was essential to the classic understanding of lying.9 Now, bald-faced lies are also a problem for some compelling views of agreement and disagreement. Cappelen and Hawthorne (2009) distinguish between 8 Stokke (2013: 43). 9 The Augustinian definition states: 'the fault of a person who tells a lie consists in his desire to deceive in expressing his thought' (Augustine [395] in Deferrari (1952), pp. 55-56). 6 agreements in state and agreements in activity, from which we can devise closely related notions of disagreement: Disagreement in state: Two people, A and B, disagree about p only if A accepts p and B rejects p. Disagreement in activity: A and B engage in the activity of disagreeing about p when they debate, argue, discuss, or negotiate whether p.10 If we take Sorensen's definition of bald-faced lies at, well, face value, it would seem that the bald-faced liar and his audience cannot disagree in state about p, since they both accept that p is false. And it is hard to see how they can disagree in activity as to whether p when they all take for granted that p is false, and furthermore take for granted that the speaker has no intention to deceive. 2.3 Fictionalism about bald-faced lies In this section, I introduce the new take on bald-faced lies mentioned in the introduction: that they are not lies because they are not assertions, a view that is defended by Jessica Keiser and Ishani Maitra. Keiser (2017) argues that bald-faced lies are not moves in a conversation, but moves in some distinct language game. As such, they do not require us to abandon the classic Augustinian definition. Keiser takes it for granted that to lie is directly to assert what one believes to be false. She also holds a definition of assertion that is close to that of Bach and Harnish: Assertion: By uttering s, U asserts p iff for some audience A 1. U meant p. 2. U utters s R-intending that (1) will provide A with a reason to believe that U believes p. (Keiser 2016, p. 470) Here, R-intending is a species of reflexive intention. On this definition, to assert is to intend to give the audience a reason to believe that the speaker believes that p. This definition, coupled with the assumption that to lie is directly to assert what one believes to be false, entails that lying involves an intention to deceive. Keiser's claim, in short, is that there cannot be lies without the intent to deceive, by definition. Since it is common ground that a bald-faced liar says what is believed to be false in the context of the utterance, clearly the audience is provided with no reason to believe that the speaker believes what is being said. Hence, Keiser concludes, the speaker must be doing something other than 'conversation': There is no reflexive communicative intention over and above the transmission of this content-he does not intend his audience to do anything with that content on the basis of the recognition of his intention-so he [Pantangelli] does not perform an illocutionary act or make a move in a conversation. But by performing this locution under oath and in this setting, he makes a move in a different game-the courtroom game. (Keiser, 2016, p. 471) 10 Cappelen and Hawthorne (2009, pp. 60). See also Marques (2014) on doxastic disagreements, and Marques and Cohnitz (2014) for further discussion of disagreement problems. 7 The problem with this argument, however, is that it merely insists that a definition of assertion requiring a communicative intention simply rules out by definition bald-faced lies as serious counterexamples: bald-faced lies cannot be assertions, because, if they were, the theory of communicative intention would be wrong. Moreover, the solution – that all bald-faced lies are moves in language games other than conversation – is ad hoc. Keiser claims that Pantangelli is making a move in a courtroom game; but in how many language games are bald-faced lies legitimate 'moves'? Is the cheating student making a move in a get-away-with-cheating-atuniversity game? Is Takhlef making a move in a please-your-autocratic-leader language game? One may wonder how speakers know what all these different language games are, and how they navigate between them. Like Keiser, Maitra (2018) argues that bald-faced lies are not assertions. She categorizes bald-faced lies as utterances of p that do not involve an intention to deceive about p. This contrasts with the alternative taxonomy which I will defend: that baldfaced lies are assertions that p in contexts where it is common knowledge that p is false. Since bald-faced lies involve no intention to deceive, they are not lies, and are not morally wrong, she holds. Maitra distinguishes what she sees as real cases of bald-faced lies from other lies that may still be blatant and 'undisguised', but which do involve some intent to deceive. These latter cases would be knowledge-lies:11 a speaker can assert p, even though it's common ground that p is false. Here, the speaker can still intend to undermine the audience's confidence in not-p by insisting on p. Asserting an 'undisguised' lie may be enough to shake the confidence some other person has in not-p, which in turn can suffice for deception and even gaslighting. In contrast, cases like (1)-(3) involve no deceitful intentions. Maitra offers a constitutive rule for assertion that differs from Williamson's knowledge-rule: Evidence-Responsiveness Rule: If a speaker S's utterance of U is not sufficiently responsive to her (total) evidence that bears on p, she does not assert p via uttering U. (Maitra 2018, p. 72) Constitutive-rule accounts allow for a speaker to assert while violating a constitutive rule. However, when the violations of the rules of a game are too blatant, Maitra claims, we can wonder whether the participants are still playing the game, or whether they are engaging some other activity. Bald-faced lies are just such blatant violations of the norm that governs assertion. Hence, we are justified in doubting whether bald-faced lies are actually assertions. Now, if not assertions, what are they? According to Maitra, they are like performances of a script: a kind of fiction-making. There are indeed plausible similarities between a speaker uttering a bald-faced lie, and an actor performing the lines of a script. Bald-faced liars want to be on record as having made the utterances they made. And there are other similarities: (1) A speaker S who utters a bald-faced lie p knows that p is false, knows that audience knows that p is false, etc. The same happens when an actor on stage tells a fellow actor: 'You are the most earnest person I know!' (2) S can be thought of as following a script, just like an actor on stage. 11 See Sorensen (2010). 8 (3) S's performance is not only intended partly for S's immediate interlocutor. Crucially, it is also intended for others, beyond the immediate audience. This can be the same for actors who address people who are off stage. (4) Finally, speaker S and hearer H are aware of (1) to (3). (Maitra, 2019, p. 76) In the next section, I will offer two objections to the fictionalist view, which support the claim that bald-faced lies are assertions. 3 TWO OBJECTIONS We accuse bald-faced liars of lying, while they may attempt to defuse that accusation by deflecting the criticism to us. Also, bald-faced liars often try to obfuscate the illocutionary force of the speech act they had performed. Both are indications that they asserted. These are problems for Keiser and Maitra, as I will now show. 3.1 'That's a lie!' is not a criticism of fiction Maitra's comparison of bald-faced liars with actors making a performance is problematic, in spite of the apparent initial plausibility, because we accuse bald-faced liars of lying, but not performers. In the same way, we do not accuse those who state non-assertions, make wild conjectures or crack jokes, for instance, of lying. That means that accusing bald-faced liars of lying – something we do – is a problem for Maitra and Keiser alike. Imagine the following situation. The actor who says to her fellow-actor on stage 'You are the most earnest person I know!' while believing quite the opposite to be the case, and believing that this is common knowledge. Nobody should accuse such an actor of lying during the performance: neither the audience nor the other actors. Suppose now that people are chatting and the actor interrupts the performance and addresses the audience in a very annoyed manner saying: 'Do you think I enjoy standing on stage every night reciting these lines to this cynic?' The actor is being honest, but the only criticism due is for breaking character, not for previously lying. By contrast, if we imagine Takhlef or Pantangelli 'breaking character' and 'going off script' to tell the truth – that Corleone is a criminal, that Hussein is not a wonderful president – we would not now criticize them for breaking character, unless, of course, we were Corleone or Hussein. Those who benefit from bald-faced lies, or who make them, often accuse their accusers of being the liars. Indeed, the media engaged in checking the truth of Trump's claims every day are accused of being 'dishonest' or 'crooked'; they are 'the lying New York Times', 'the fake Washington Post.' These are Trump's go-to insults when talking about the press whose job it is to check him. This strategy is called DARVO – an acronym for deny, attack, and reverse the victim and the offender – and is a tactic that domestic abusers often deploy. It is also a giveaway that the bald-faced liar did lie and, hence, did assert.12 3.2 If cornered, does the bald-faced liar 'walk-back'? 12 See for instance Frey (2018). 9 If it were true that bald-faced lies are a kind of fiction-making, it should be ok to say so. But we condemn seeming 'walk-backs'13 of the assertoric force of bald-faced lies that cast them as non-assertions. Two examples illustrate this. During the brief period Anthony Scaramucci was a spokesperson for Donald Trump, he suggested that Trump had pushed back his news conference from 15 December 2016 because '[Trump]'s a very precise, very detail-oriented guy' who wants to have 'all of the answers to all of the types of questions that's he's gonna get thrown.' Trump had earlier tweeted, on December 12, that he would have a news conference "in the near future to discuss the business, Cabinet picks and all other topics of interest".14 In late 2019, it was still not clear if he divested from his businesses, and many cabinet positions were never filled.15 Once it became clear that the December 15 news conference would not happen, Scaramucci gave an interview in which he commented on Trump's tweets on the matter: 'Trump's claims are to be taken symbolically and not literally.' Early in 2019, and during then ongoing investigation of the special council into Russian interference in the 2016 US elections, and of suspicious links between Trump, Trump associates, and Russian officials, Rudy Giuliani said on January 20 that Trump told him the negotiations over a Moscow skyscraper continued through 'the day I won,' and that the president recalled 'fleeting conversations' about the deal after the Trump Organization signed a letter of intent to pursue it. This came after days of conflicting declarations by Giuliani on whether he had any knowledge of collusion. The timeline of the negotiations mattered since it could show that there were links between Trump associates and Russia. As it turns out, this statement was true and answered correctly the question under discussion: Did Trump Tower Moscow negotiations continue until after the election? Notice that Giuliani's claim was a bona fide Stalnakerian assertion – it reduced the possibilities that were left open by interlocutors, given the purposes of the conversation. But Giuliani didn't have the intention that his interlocutors believe what he said. Allowing for this assertion to stand was a problem for Trump and his campaign officials. The next day, Giuliani said: My recent statements about discussions during the 2016 campaign between Michael Cohen and then-candidate Donald Trump about a potential Trump Moscow 'project' were hypothetical and not based on conversations I had with the president.16 (My emphasis). What were Scaramucci and Giuliani doing? Were they correcting the record, pointing out that previous discourse was a kind of fiction-making, 'symbolic' or 'hypothetical'? Or were they doing something else? In recent work, Laura Caponetto (2018) draws on Austin's distinction between the illocutionary and perlocutionary effects of speech acts to explain how we undo things with words. Illocutionary effects are determined by their force and enter the context automatically. In contrast, perlocutionary effects can be unpredictable and are 13 I'm borrowing the phrase from the journalist Maggie Haberman (2019), not agreeing that it accurately describes what is going on. 14 See McCaskill (2016). 15 See Miller and Jaffe (2019) in the Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nationalsecurity/in-aftermath-of-ukraine-crisis-a-climate-of-mistrust-and-threats/2019/12/24/03831e3e-235911ea-a153-dce4b94e4249_story.html. 16 As reported by Haberman in the NY Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/21/us/politics/giulianitrump-tower-russia.html 10 independent of whether the act was felicitous. Caponetto then distinguishes three ways of undoing things with words. The first is via annulments, which apply to fatally infelicitous acts that are mistakenly taken as felicitous: the speech act was not actually made, and the annulment rectifies that mistake. Consider the parallel situation of the annulment of a marriage when the person purporting to have celebrated the ceremony did not have the appropriate authority to do so; this does not undo a marriage, which never occurred, but registers this fact. Second, the goal of retractions is to cancel deontic updates that were successfully generated by a past illocution, for instance, when one realizes that one's claim that p is not true, or not sufficiently warranted, and says "I guess I was wrong, I take that back". In the marriage analogy, retractions are more like a divorce. Finally, amendments allow speakers to alter the force of their own acts without changing the broad kind of act performed: constative or directive. For instance, speakers can amend an assertion that p by saying '... at least I guess that p'. Amendments, as Caponetto says, tamper with the normative strength of the act already performed. Now, it seems that people disapprove of what Scaramucci and Giuliani do in calling previous claims 'symbolic' or 'hypothetical.'17 But what do they disapprove? I think that we must rule out two implausible answers. Scaramucci and Giuliani do not annul an infelicitous attempt to perform a speech act; and what they say doesn't support such a hypothesis. Neither do they retract: they do not say that the former statements were false, wrong, or out of place. They also do not say "I take it back". Nonetheless, there are two plausible interpretations of what Scaramucci and Giuliani are doing, which can explain why people find their actions reprehensible: (i) they are amending the illocutionary force of an assertion, or (ii) they are lying about the illocutionary force of that assertion. On the first interpretation, they were amending a previous assertion by weakening its illocutionary strength. In this case, there would have been an initial assertion, that assertion was reprehensible for some reason, and to avoid criticism its force is weakened in a way that would evade such criticism. In this case, perhaps the reason people condemn Scaramucci's or Giuliani's actions is because people perceive that the amendments were done just to evade criticism. On the second possible interpretation, Scaramucci and Giuliani were lying about the illocutionary force of their, or Trump's, utterances. Trump would have lied, and then Scaramucci lied about that lie: not about its content, but about its illocutionary force. Similarly, Giuliani would have accidentally spoken the truth, and then lied about having asserted, not about the content of the assertion. The reader is free to consider the merits of each of these possibilities. Either way, the original act was an assertion. Hence, it was not an act of fiction-making. I started this section by showing that we criticize bald-faced liars in ways we do not (and should not) criticize performers of fictional scripts. That criticism crucially includes accusations of lying. Additionally, when cornered, liars often accuse those who publicly denounce them as the real liars. They do so defensively and to divert the accusation, which is an indication that they lied and asserted. Moreover, if it were true 17 This can be confirmed in the comment section of Haberman's article in the NY Times, for instance: 'This whole Giuliani-Trump thread started out as being amusing and typical for the principals in this comedy/drama: Lie, misdirect, obfuscate and counterattack.' Another reader says 'What a farce. Aren't you tired of all this gaslighting, Americans?', and someone else asks 'What lawyer would ever, EVER make such hypotheticals about their client? It doesn't pass.' 11 that bald-faced lies are not assertions, then (i) what could be amendments of the assertoric force of previous utterances would not be amendments at all, but acknowledgments that those utterances were mere conjectures to begin with. This would make the criticism people dedicate to these claims an unexplained mystery. On the other hand, (ii), the denial that those previous utterances were assertions would now be plain uninteresting truths, they would not be new lies. In this case, again, all the criticism from the people who see them as lies would also remain unexplained. In other words, we can only make sense of people's strong disapproval of what such speakers are doing (whether they are amending or lying) if the original utterance was an assertion. 4 GASLIGHTING AND DISAGREEMENT In this section, I argue that it is because bald-faced lies are assertions that they can contribute to undermining the epistemic assurance of their audience. Furthermore, it is in the light of this that we can finally explain how it is that we disagree with a baldfaced liar. 4.1 Undermining epistemic assurance The previous section helped to establish what I think bald-faced lies do: they are lies that blatantly violate assertoric norms in virtue of asserting what is taken for granted in the context to be false. Although I favour a constitutive-rule account, I will not argue for it here. I will only sketch how I think bald-faced lies serve to dominate: they do so by imposing false assertions in conversational contexts, and they do so by contributing to 'gaslighting'. It's because bald-faced liars openly and shamelessly violate assertoric norms that they can often (but not necessarily) exploit illocutionary assertoric effects to produce additional perlocutionary effects. A common (but not necessary) perlocutionary effect of a bald-faced lie is that the audience acquires some credence in what was asserted, even if what was asserted contradicts previous beliefs.18 This is precisely what contributes to diminishing the audience's confidence in what they previously believed. As Caponetto (2018, p. 5) succinctly explains, the difference between illocutionary and perlocutionary effects is that an illocutionary effect is determined by the force of the speech act performed, and automatically enters the context. Meanwhile, perlocutionary effects are those that are caused by the speech act but are not intrinsic or constitutive of that speech act itself. The illocutionary effects of an assertion include the audience's acceptance that an act that is subject to assertoric norms has been made. If this is so, the fact that it is common knowledge that the speaker asserted something false does not suffice to cancel the illocutionary effects of assertion. If the rule of assertion is Williamson's KR, for instance, in accommodating an assertion in a conversation the audience accepts that the speaker presents himself as knowing what he says. Bald-faced liars exploit this illocutionary effect: they present themselves as knowing what they say, although it's common ground that they lack such knowledge. They thereby exploit assertoric norms, while blatantly abusing those very same norms. In this way, they 18 Mandelbaum (2014) argues that we generally do believe what people say, even when we know that what they say is false. I do not wish to take a stance here on Mandelbaum's views, but to recognize that it offers a seemingly plausible explanation of how bald-faced lies can help undermining an epistemic stance. 12 display dominance, as if saying: 'You know I'm lying. What are you going to do about it?'19 Recall that, as we saw in section 2.3, Maitra discriminates between two types of undisguised utterances of falsehoods: bald-faced lies (non-assertions) and other undisguised lies (assertions). She argues that when a violation of the rules of a game are too blatant, we can wonder whether the participants are still playing the game, or whether they are engaging some other activity. Likewise, utterances that are blatant violations of assertion norms would give us reasons to think that they're not assertions. But Maitra wants to allow some such blatant violations of assertion norms to still be assertions, because the speaker may happen to intend to deceive the audience. However, if the criterion for discounting an utterance as an assertion were that it blatantly violates the relevant constitutive rule, then both types of undisguised falsehoods Maitra contemplates would be such non-assertions.20 It seems that Maitra is relying instead on the speaker's intentions as the real difference-making criterion between assertions and non-assertions. But that is at odds with her own constitutive rule account, according to which assertion depends on evidence-responsiveness, rather than the speaker's intentions. Moreover, any undisguised assertion of a false proposition p, whether made with the intent to deceive or not, can have the perlocutionary effect of undermining the confidence of the audience in not-p. This perlocutionary effect is independent of the intentions of the speaker. but of course he may intend to exploit it, and he can do so because an undisguised lie can produce it. It is the assertion of a clear falsehood that creates a conflict with what the audience believed. But since this perlocutionary effect does not require the speaker's intent to produce it, the intention to deceive cannot be the real difference-making criterion that separates bald-faced lies from 'undisguised' lies that are assertions. Now, gaslighting can include not only bald-faced lies, but also contradictions, utter claptrap, etc. The use of such untruths can further contribute to dominate an audience: diminishing their epistemic assurance also diminishes their ability to resist manipulation. A quote often mistakenly attributed to Groucho Marx illustrates baldfaced lies that target one's perception: 'who ya gonna believe, me or your own eyes?' (The line is from the 1933 movie Duck Soup). In 1984, Orwell illustrates bald-faced lies that target one's rationality when O'Brien asks Winston: '"Do you remember", he went on, "writing in your diary, "Freedom is the freedom, to say that two plus two make four"?"' (Orwell, 1954/1989: 286) As readers will remember, Winston will come to doubt that he knows this, and will accept that two plus two make five. Donald Trump often challenges people's memory, for instance, when he claimed 'I never said I was going to build a concrete wall.'21 Masha Gessen often writes about the role of bald-faced lies in propaganda. At the end of 2018, she described authoritarian propaganda and our difficulty to comprehend how it operates: 19 In Marques and García-Carpintero (2020), we argue that weapon uses of slurs offend because they make a context-update proposal that the target audience clearly does not want to accept. The overt violation of cooperative conversational norms is how the speaker displays domination over the addressee. 20 Michaelson and Stokke (2019) similarly criticize Maitra's claim here. They argue that lies can give the speaker some form of positional advantage over the audience. The details of their proposal differ from the view I offer below. 21 Trump must know that anyone can check that he did say it, for instance, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QguzPi-WhvM 13 Totalitarian propaganda is overwhelming and inconsistent. It bombards you with mutually contradictory claims, which often come packaged in doublethink pairs... Russian propaganda is a direct descendant of totalitarian Soviet propaganda. Far from promoting a single guiding ideology, this kind of propaganda robs you of your bearings. The regime gains a monopoly on reality, and can make any claim whatsoever. Hannah Arendt famously described the totalitarian ruler's ascendance this way: "In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true... Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow." (Gessen 2018. My emphasis.) Totalitarian propaganda rides on the back of bald-faced lies and Orwellian doublethink (which I discuss as meaning perversions elsewhere). 22 Orwell, Gessen, and Arendt knew that the effect of a tsunami of bald-faced lies in public discourse is that public discourse is reduced to daily white noise; they knew it well before Dahlia Lithwick correctly diagnosed Trump's effect on fact checking. The result of long-term exposure to bald-faced lies is that cooperative, rational, norm-guided communication is subverted, and authoritarians gain 'a monopoly on reality.' Fictionalism about bald-faced lies cannot explain this double abuse: the blatant violation of assertoric norms, and the possible undermining of the audience's epistemic assurance. The moral disapproval of this abuse is not a mere a 'rhetorical illusion,' as Sorensen suggested. 4.2 How do you disagree with a bald-faced liar? If bald-faced lies were fictional, non-assertions, there should be no disagreements with bald-faced liars. But if bald-faced lies are assertions that exploit conversational and assertoric norms, we can disagree with a bald-faced liar. Indeed, it's because an assertion is made that the bald-faced liar and his audience can disagree in attitude and in activity. Disagreement with a bald-face liar requires more than restating the truth through fact-checking. As Lithwick pointed out, endlessly correcting the conversational record runs the risk of producing white noise, without preventing the undermining of the epistemic assurance of the audience. The Scaramucci and Giuliani cases show that there are disagreements that involve more than uttering inconsistent propositions. There is no incompatibility in raising the hypothesis that p and raising the hypothesis that not-p in a context, for instance. For two claims to be incompatible, their acceptance must conflict in the right way. Incompatible context update proposals must involve the relevant normative illocutionary force. Otherwise there would be no difference between adding to context p as asserted, and adding p as conjectured; but there is such a difference. Thus, interlocutors' disagreement can concern whether it is permissible to allow a context update proposal with p as asserted. On Stalnaker's definition of common ground (see above, section 2.2) it is possible that a proposition is accepted for the purpose of the conversation but not believed. This possibility is the possibility of defective contexts, for instance, that a 22 Marques (2020). 14 speaker can 'say something that shows that she believes that it is (or will be) common belief that φ where the addressee does not believe that φ, even after recognizing that the speaker is presupposing it' (p. 717). The defective context can be rectified if the addressee comes to accommodate that φ, not by coming to believe the false proposition presupposed by the other speaker, but by accepting it as part of the common ground (p. 718) If false presuppositions can be accommodated in context, so can false assertions. Now, what the Giuliani and Scaramucci cases show is that the accommodation of an assertion requires more than accommodating the proposition asserted. As we argue in Marques and García-Carpintero (2020), contexts are more than sets of propositions accepted as part of the common ground. Contexts are structured by commitments to propositions under different illocutionary forces (or different modes), and different speech acts require different commitments.23 How can this help to explain disagreement with a bald-faced liar? The bald-faced liar puts forward a proposition p as asserted. The disagreement with the speaker cannot be about whether p is true, since it is common knowledge that p is false. The disagreement is also not about whether the speaker asserted – arguably that is also common knowledge. The disagreement can nonetheless be about whether the illocutionary effects of an assertion are allowed to update context. The speaker and the audience can disagree in attitude whenever they have incompatible intentions concerning permissible illocutionary context updates24. A speaker and audience can also disagree in activity if and when they act on these incompatible intentions concerning permissible context updates. The student wants to be on record as having asserted his innocence; the dean and the professor do not want it. Pantangelli wants to be on record as having asserted his ignorance of Corleone's crimes; the FBI and the US Senate do not, etc.25 The update of context with a false p as the content of an act of fiction-making, or hypothetically as a conjecture, would not have been reprehensible. It is reprehensible if p is asserted. Hence, context updates register not just the uttered propositions, but also the normative changes effected by the speech acts performed in uttering them. And it is because p, which we know to be false, is asserted that we disagree with the speaker, whereas we wouldn't disagree with the speaker had p been uttered 'symbolically,' or 'hypothetically.' Disagreement with a bald-faced liar requires, then, resisting the illocutionary effects his assertion would otherwise have. This resistance can function by blocking illocutionary assertoric effects,26 or through retroactive illocutionary disablement27. But whereas attempts to block what Langton (2018) calls 'backdoor speech-acts' can be very difficult, blocking a bald-faced lie can effectively resort to calling the bald-faced liar a liar. 5 CONCLUSIONS I have argued that there are reasons to treat bald-faced lies as assertions, against the arguments of Keiser and Maitra to the contrary. We accuse bald-faced liars of lying, and in defence they often return the accusation. When cornered, bald-faced liars may lie again, now about the speech acts they had previously made. I suggested that, as assertions, bald-faced lies openly and shamelessly violate assertoric norms, while often exploiting the illocutionary effects of assertions to 23 See also García-Carpintero (2015). 24 I offered a definition of attitude incompatibility in earlier work (Marques, 2016, p. 313) 25 Khoo and Knobe (2016) argue that incompatible context-update proposals are disagreements. 26 See Langton (2018). 27 See Langton (1993). 15 produce further perlocutionary effects. The illocutionary effects of assertions include the audience's uptake that an act conforming to assertoric norms has been made. Common perlocutionary effects often include gaslighting. Disagreement with a baldfaced liar requires that we block those illocutionary effects, and one good way of doing so is to denounce their lies. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I'm grateful to the audiences of various events, special thanks to: Derek Ball, Gregory Bochner, Emma Borg, Tom Cochrane, Garrett Cullity, Esa Díaz-Leon, Antony Eagle, Maryam Ebrahimi, Timothy Endicott, Jordi Fernandez, Sarah Fischer, Manuel GarcíaCarpintero, Bart Geurts, Philip Gerrans, Mario Gómez-Torrente, Javier González de Prado Salas, Jumbly Grindrod, Jędrzej Piotr Grodniewicz, Nat Hansen, Carl Hoefer, Marija Jancovik, Markus Kneer, Manfred Krifka, Josep Maciá, Neri Marsili, Mohan Matthen, Jonny McIntosh, Ricardo Mena, Eliot Michaelson, Raphael Morris, Michele Palmira, François Recanati, Martina Rosola, Antonio Scarafone, Miguel Angel Sebastian, Merel Semeijn, Marat Shardimgaliev, Pepa Toribio, Aart Van Gils, and Åsa Wikforss. Thanks also to an anonymous referee for detailed and useful comments, and to Christopher Evans for his grammatical revision. 16 REFERENCES Augustine. (395/1952). Lying. In R. 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