One can lie by asserting non-literal content. If I tell you ‘You are the cream in my coffee’ while hating you, I can be rightfully accused of lying if my true emotions are unearthed. This is not easy to accommodate under many definitions of lying while preserving the lying-misleading distinction. The essential feature of non-literal utterances is their falsity when literally construed. This interferes with accounts of lying and misleading, because such accounts often combine a literal construal of what is said by an utterance with a falsity requirement for lying. In the presence of non-literal lies, such definitions fail to make plausible predictions for non-literal lies and merely misleading utterances together. In this article, I aim to fix this by extending Daniel Hoek’s pragmatic account of conversational exculpature to assertions in general. Since this mechanism is designed to compute the intended meanings of non-literal utterances, it straightforwardly predicts non-literal lies to be as such. The lying-misleading distinction is also preserved, because merely misleading utterances arise out of exploiting a different pragmatic mechanism—Gricean additive implicatures. Along the way, I also draw some general lessons about assertion and implicatures.

中文翻译：

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非字面意思的谎言并不能成为无罪的理由


人们可以通过断言非字面内容来撒谎。如果我在恨你的同时告诉你“你是我咖啡里的奶油”，如果我的真实情感被挖掘出来，我就有理由被指控撒谎。在保留撒谎与误导的区别的同时，这并不容易适应许多撒谎的定义。非字面话语的基本特征是，当按字面解释时，它们是虚假的。这会干扰对说谎和误导的描述，因为此类描述通常将对话语所说内容的字面解释与说谎的虚假性要求结合起来。在存在非字面谎言的情况下，这样的定义无法对非字面谎言和仅仅误导性的言论做出合理的预测。在这篇文章中，我的目标是通过将丹尼尔·霍克（Daniel Hoek）对对话辩解的实用解释扩展到一般断言来解决这个问题。由于该机制旨在计算非字面话语的预期含义，因此它直接预测非字面谎言。谎言与误导的区别也被保留下来，因为误导性话语只是通过利用不同的语用机制——格赖斯附加含义而产生的。在此过程中，我还吸取了一些关于断言和含义的一般教训。