On untruthfulness, its adversaries and strange bedfellows
This introductory paper aims to demystify the concept of untruthfulness. Drawing on the scholarship on deception, the author reports on a distinction between the (objective) truth and (subjective) truthfulness, as well as their respective opposites: falsehood and untruthfulness. An attempt is made to discriminate between truthfulness and sincerity, to notions which capture similar phenomena but have originated in distinct scholarly traditions. Further, the author depicts untruthfulness as an internally diversified construct and teases out its main subtypes. Some light is shed on overt untruthfulness and covert untruthfulness, as approached in philosophical, cognitive and pragmatic literature. The paper closes with a description of the scope of the present Special Issue entitled “New theoretical insights into untruthfulness”.
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Cited by (3)
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Dynel, Marta
2016.
“Trolling is not stupid”: Internet trolling as the art of deception serving entertainment.
Intercultural Pragmatics 13:3
Dynel, Marta
2017.
But seriously: On conversational humour and (un)truthfulness.
Lingua 197
► pp. 83 ff.
Dynel, Marta
2017.
The Irony of Irony: Irony Based on Truthfulness.
Corpus Pragmatics 1:1
► pp. 3 ff.
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