Alex Wiegmann
@ruhr-uni-bochum.de
Ruhr-University Bochum
Scopus Publications
Scholar Citations
Scholar h-index
Scholar i10-index
Scopus Publications
Vladimir Krstić and Alexander Wiegmann
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Louisa M. Reins and Alex Wiegmann
SAGE Publications
In times of what has been coined “post-truth politics,” people are regularly confronted with political actors who intentionally spread false or misleading information. The present article examines (a) to what extent partisans’ judgments of such behaviors as cases of lying are affected by whether the deceiving agent shares their partisanship (actual bias) and (b) to what extent partisans expect the lie judgments of others to be affected by a bias of this kind (perceived bias). In two preregistered experiments ( N = 1,040), we find partisans’ lie judgments to be only weakly affected by the partisanship ascribed to political deceivers, regardless of whether deceivers explicitly communicate or merely insinuate political falsehoods. At the same time, partisans expect their political opponents’ lie judgments to be strongly affected by the deceiving agents’ partisanship. Surprisingly, misperceptions of bias were also present in people’s predictions of bias within their own political camp.
Alex Wiegmann
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
AbstractDoes lying require objective falsity? Given that consistency with ordinary language is a desideratum of a philosophical definition of lying, empirical evidence plays an important role. A literature review reveals that studies employing a simple question-and-response format, such as “Did the speaker lie? [Yes/No]”, favour the subjective view of lying, according to which objective falsity is not required. However, it has recently been claimed that the rate of lie attributions found in those studies is artificially inflated due to perspective taking; and that if measures are applied to avoid this problem, the results actually support the objective view of lying. This paper presents three experiments that challenge this claim by showing that the findings used to support the objective view have been misinterpreted. It is thus concluded that the folk concept of lying does not require objective falsity, which is consistent with the dominant view in the philosophical literature.
Joachim Horvath and Alex Wiegmann
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
AbstractWe investigate the impact of informal arguments on judgments about thought experiment cases in light of Deutsch and Cappelen’s mischaracterization view, which claims that philosophers’ case judgments are primarily based on arguments and not intuitions. If arguments had no influence on case judgments, this would seriously challenge whether they are, or should be, based on arguments at all—and not on other cognitive sources instead, such as intuition. In Experiment 1, we replicated Wysocki’s (Rev Philos Psychol 8(2):477–499, 2017) pioneering study on a Gettier-style case, and we confirmed that the informal arguments used by him had no significant effect. However, we also included an improved argument for ascribing knowledge, which did have a significant effect even in Wysocki’s original design. We therefore followed up with Experiment 2 on three Gettier-style cases, where we used a more natural dialogical format for presenting both case descriptions and informal arguments. Overall, we found a clear impact of prima facie good pro and con arguments on case judgments. The issue of argument impact is thus no obstacle to arguing about thought experiments.
Louisa M. Reins, Alex Wiegmann, Olga P. Marchenko, and Irina Schumski
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
AbstractThe present study examines cross-cultural differences in people’s concept of lying with regard to the question of whether lying requires an agent to say something they believe to be false. While prominent philosophical views maintain that lying entails that a person explicitly expresses a believed-false claim, recent research suggests that people’s concept of lying might also include certain kinds of deception that are communicated more indirectly. An important drawback of previous empirical work on this topic is that only few studies have investigated people’s concept of lying in non-Western samples. In the present study, we compare people’s intuitions about lying with indirect deceptions (i.e., presuppositions, conversational implicatures, and non-verbal actions) in a sample of N = 255 participants from Russia and N = 300 participants from the United Kingdom. Our findings show a strong degree of similarity between lie ratings of participants from Russia and the United Kingdom, with both samples holding it possible for agents to lie with deceptive statements and actions that do not involve the agent saying something they believe to be false.
Adrian Ziółkowski, Alex Wiegmann, Joachim Horvath, and Edouard Machery
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
AbstractIn this paper, we report the results of three high-powered replication studies in experimental philosophy, which bear on an alleged instability of folk philosophical intuitions: the purported susceptibility of epistemic intuitions about the Truetemp case (Lehrer, Theory of knowledge. Westview Press, Boulder, 1990) to order effects. Evidence for this susceptibility was first reported by Swain et al. (Philos Phenomenol Res 76(1):138–155, 2008); further evidence was then found in two studies by Wright (Cognition 115(3):491–503. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2010.02.003, 2010) and Weinberg et al. (Monist 95(2):200–222, 2012). These empirical results have been quite influential in the recent metaphilosophical debate about the method of cases. However, none of Swain et al.’s (2008) predictions concerning order effects with Truetemp cases could be consistently and robustly replicated in our three experiments, and it is thus at best unclear whether Truetemp intuitions are in fact unstable. So, if proponents of the negative program in experimental philosophy still want to use order effects to challenge the reliability of philosophical case judgments, they would be well advised to look elsewhere instead. In any case, given the more robust empirical evidence that we present in this paper, the metaphilosophical flurry created by Swain et al. (2008) and Wright’s (2010) influential studies looks like mere alarmism in hindsight.
Alex Wiegmann
Oxford University Press (OUP)
Abstract Does lying require a speaker to explicitly express something (she believes to be) false, or is it also possible to lie with deceptive implicatures? Given that consistency with ordinary language is a desideratum of any philosophical definition of lying, several studies have addressed this question empirically in recent years. Their findings, however, seem to be in conflict. This paper reports an experiment with 222 participants that investigates the hypothesis that these conflicting results are due to variation regarding whether or not the speaker’s intention to deceive and the implicated content are made explicit. It is found that the presence versus the absence of such explicitness has a strong impact on people’s lie judgements, and can thus account for the conflicting results in the literature.
Emilian Mihailov, Ivar R. Hannikainen, and Alex Wiegmann
Informa UK Limited
Joachim Horvath and Alex Wiegmann
Informa UK Limited
Alex Wiegmann and Emanuel Viebahn
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
AbstractAccording to the subjective view of lying, speakers can lie by asserting a true proposition, as long as they believe this proposition to be false. This view contrasts with the objective view, according to which lying requires the actual falsity of the proposition asserted. The aim of this paper is to draw attention to pairs of assertions that differ only in intuitively redundant content and to show that such pairs of assertions are a reason to favour the subjective view of lying over the objective one.
Antonia F. Langenhoff, Alex Wiegmann, Joseph Y. Halpern, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, and Tobias Gerstenberg
Elsevier BV
The question of how people hold others responsible has motivated decades of theorizing and empirical work. In this paper, we develop and test a computational model that bridges the gap between broad but qualitative framework theories, and quantitative but narrow models. In our model, responsibility judgments are the result of two cognitive processes: a dispositional inference about a person's character from their action, and a causal attribution about the person's role in bringing about the outcome. We test the model in a group setting in which political committee members vote on whether or not a policy should be passed. We assessed participants' dispositional inferences and causal attributions by asking how surprising and important a committee member's vote was. Participants' answers to these questions in Experiment 1 accurately predicted responsibility judgments in Experiment 2. In Experiments 3 and 4, we show that the model also predicts moral responsibility judgments, and that importance matters more for responsibility, while surprise matters more for judgments of wrongfulness.
Neri Marsili and Alex Wiegmann
Elsevier BV
Assertions are our standard communicative devices for sharing and acquiring information. Recent studies seemingly provide converging evidence that assertions are subject to a factive norm: you are entitled to make an assertion only if it is true. However, these studies assume that we can treat participants' judgements about what an agent 'should say' as evidence of their intuitions about assertability. This paper argues that this assumption is incorrect, so the conclusions drawn in the aforementioned studies are unwarranted. We provide evidence that most people do not interpret statements about what one 'should say' as statements about assertability, but rather as statements about what is in the agent's interest to do. Measures for prompting the intended reading of the test question are identified, and their efficacy is tested. We found that when these measures are implemented, people's judgements consistently and overwhelmingly align with non-factive accounts of assertion.
Louisa M. Reins and Alex Wiegmann
Wiley
Lying is an important moral phenomenon that most people are affected by on a daily basis-be it in personal relationships, in political debates, or in the form of fake news. Nevertheless, surprisingly little is known about what actually constitutes a lie. According to the traditional definition of lying, a person lies if they explicitly express something they believe to be false. Consequently, it is often assumed that people cannot lie by more indirectly communicating believed-false claims, for instance by merely conversationally implicating them. In this paper, we subject this claim to an empirical test. In a preregistered study of 300 participants, we investigate how people judge cases of implicit deceptions that would usually be excluded by the traditional definition of lying (i.e., conversational implicatures, presuppositions, and nonverbal actions). Our results show that people do in fact consider it possible to lie by indirect means, suggesting that people have a broader concept of lying than is usually assumed. Moreover, our findings indicate that lie judgments are closely tied to the extent to which agents are perceived as having committed themselves to the believed-false claims they have communicated. We discuss the implications of our results for the traditional definition of lying and propose a new commitment-based definition of lying that can account for the findings of our experiment.
Alex Wiegmann and Ronja Rutschmann
Informa UK Limited
ABSTRACT Indifferent lies have been proposed as a counterexample to the claim that lying requires an intention to deceive. In indifferent lies, the speaker says something she believes to be false (in a truth-warranting context) but does not really care about whether the addressee believes what she says. Krstić (2019) argues that in such cases, the speaker deceives the addressee intentionally and, therefore, indifferent lies do not show that lying does not require an intention to deceive. While we agree that the speaker deceives the addressee intentionally, we resist Krstić’s conclusion by pointing out that there is a difference between deceiving intentionally and intending to deceive. To this aim, we presented 268 participants with a new variant of an indifferent lie and asked whether the speaker lied, whether she had an intention to deceive, and whether she deceived intentionally. Whereas the majority of participants considered the speaker to have deceived the addressee intentionally, most denied that the speaker had an intention to deceive the addressee. Hence, indifferent lies still challenge widely accepted definitions of lying.
Alex Wiegmann and Jörg Meibauer
Wiley
Alex Wiegmann, Ronja Rutschmann, and Pascale Willemsen
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
The funding information is missing in the original article. It is given below.
Tim Kraft and Alex Wiegmann
Oxford University Press
According to epistemic closure, if someone knows some proposition P and also knows that P entails Q, she knows Q as well. This is often defended by appealing to its intuitiveness. Only recently, however, was epistemic closure put to the empirical test: Turri ran experiments in which closure is violated in folk knowledge ascriptions surprisingly often. The chapter authors disagree with this diagnosis. It is by no means obvious which experimentally testable hypothesis proponents of epistemic closure should accept. The chapter formulates a different hypothesis and argues that it is more apt for empirically testing epistemic closure. In a series of experiments the chapter authors manipulated the strength of entailment between two propositions and found that the stronger the entailment, the lower the proportion of participants who violated closure, indicating folk knowledge ascriptions are sensitive to entailment. The chapter concludes that closure is a principle of folk epistemology after all.
Alex Wiegmann, Ronja Rutschmann, and Pascale Willemsen
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Lying is an everyday moral phenomenon about which philosophers have written a lot. Not only the moral status of lying has been intensively discussed but also what it means to lie in the first place. Perhaps the most important criterion for an adequate definition of lying is that it fits with people’s understanding and use of this concept. In this light, it comes as a surprise that researchers only recently started to empirically investigate the folk concept of lying. In this paper, we describe three experimental studies which address the following questions: Does a statement need to be objectively false in order to constitute lying? Does lying necessarily include the intention to deceive? Can one lie by omitting relevant facts?
Ronja Rutschmann and Alex Wiegmann
Informa UK Limited
Abstract According to the traditional definition of lying, somebody lies if he or she makes a believed-false statement with the intention to deceive. The traditional definition has recently been challenged by non-deceptionists who use bald-faced lies to underpin their view that the intention to deceive is no necessary condition for lying. We conducted two experiments to test whether their assertions are true. First, we presented one of five scenarios that consisted of three different kinds of lies (consistent bald-faced lies, conflicting bald-faced lies, and indifferent lies). Then we asked participants to judge whether the scenario at hand was a lie, whether the speaker intended to deceive somebody, and how they would judge the behavior in terms of morality. As expected, our results indicate that the intention to deceive is not a necessary condition for lying. Participants rated indifferent lies to be lies and judged that no intention to deceive was involved in these cases. In addition, all bald-faced lies were evaluated as lies. However, participants widely ascribed an intention to deceive to bald-faced lies, which thus might not apply as counterexamples against the traditional definition of lying. Besides, lies are judged as morally wrong regardless of an intention to deceive.
Alex Wiegmann and Magda Osman
Hogrefe Publishing Group
Magda Osman and Alex Wiegmann
Hogrefe Publishing Group
Abstract. In this review we make a simple theoretical argument which is that for theory development, computational modeling, and general frameworks for understanding moral psychology researchers should build on domain-general principles from reasoning, judgment, and decision-making research. Our approach is radical with respect to typical models that exist in moral psychology that tend to propose complex innate moral grammars and even evolutionarily guided moral principles. In support of our argument we show that by using a simple value-based decision model we can capture a range of core moral behaviors. Crucially, the argument we propose is that moral situations per se do not require anything specialized or different from other situations in which we have to make decisions, inferences, and judgments in order to figure out how to act.