It is impossible to understand Kant’s essay “On a Supposed Right to Lie” without a sense of how Kant’s theory of truth and truthfulness developed over time; and it is impossible to trace the development of Kant’s thought without a clear sense of the conceptual framework that he took as his starting point. This chapter examines the early modern debate with its distinction between morally objectionable lies (mendacia) and morally innocent falsified assertions (falsiloquia) and then presents Kant’s thoughts on the topic in his lectures and in his major writings on moral philosophy. He endorses the distinction between unobjectionable and objectionable falsehoods in the early lectures; in his later publications, he rejects it.

Fiction writers in the nineteenth century engaged an evolving assemblage of understandings and conflicts concerning their stories and their relationship with politics. Early decades were characterized by suspicions about the value of fiction and its potential for disrupting the demands of nation-building. With industrialization and mass culture came a new appreciation for literary fiction as vehicle for both consensus-building and sociopolitical change. Through it all, most writers and readers, while employing a variety of modalities and aiming at different political targets, maintained the conviction that fiction, when in the hands of a truth-teller, could convey the “truth” of “great principles” and thus do political work. To demonstrate these nineteenth-century understandings of the intersections of fiction and politics, this chapter examines fiction across the century in three different periods consistent with the history of the book and print culture: the first running roughly from 1800 to the late 1830s, after the nation’s birth but before the age of mass culture; from 1840 to the late 1870s, the age of the industrial book; and from 1880 to century’s end, the early days of modernism, new conceptions of language, and the autonomous work of art.

State responses to the recent ‘crisis’ caused by misinformation in social media have mainly aimed to impose liability on those who facilitate its dissemination. Internet companies, especially large platforms, have deployed numerous techniques, measures and instruments to address the phenomenon. However, little has been done to assess the importance of who originates disinformation and, in particular, whether some originators of misinformation are acting contrary to their preexisting obligations to the public. My view is that it would be wrong to attribute only to social media a central or exclusive role in the new disinformation crisis that impacts the information ecosystem.

Many legal and political commentators dubbed Donald Trump’s false claim that he was the actual victor of the 2020 American presidential election, ‘the Big Lie’. No matter how he complained and dissembled, he lost. After losing the 2020 election, Trump went on a fundraising binge, asking his supporters to give to his legal defense fund so that he could litigate the results of the 2020 election, which he fraudulently claimed he had won. According to the House of Representatives’ January 6 Select Committee, this fund did not exist. As Select Committee member Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren put it, ‘the Big Lie was also a big rip-off’. Because the 2020 presidential election was not stolen, and the legal defense fund he touted was nonexistent, Trump’s post-2020 election fundraising was a fraud within a fraud – giving rise to a reasonable argument that it violated the federal wire fraud statute and also constituted common law fraud.

This chapter considers how investigative deceptions fit into the traditional rationales for protecting free speech, and offers guidance on where the law is likely to evolve on these questions.

This chapter considers how investigative deceptions fit into the traditional rationales for protecting free speech, and offers guidance on where the law is likely to evolve on these questions.

This chapter uses a famous article on the communicative features of “bullshitting” (Frankfurt 2005) to shed fresh light on select statements by Donald Trump. Frankfurt’s central observation was that in bullshitting, unlike lying, the speaker isn’t deliberately aiming to deceive and cover up the truth; rather, he can’t be bothered to care about the truth conditions of a statement. While Trump has undoubtedly told countless willful lies, some of his utterances suggest instead a predominance of bullshit. This chapter investigates Trump’s bullshit from a communicative perspective, focusing on Trump’s stance in using bullshit (in particular his desire to produce a positive self-impression) and his use of Twitter as a medium that particularly encourages bullshit in its short character bursts. Bullshitting becomes another tool in Trump’s strategy of branded entertainment, used for self-aggrandizing and to boost his impression management, to create the Trump’ spectacle, and to test others’ loyalty.

This section introduction furnishes an overview of Trump’s verbal behavior when it verges on or crosses into falsehood, by way of innuendo, gaslighting, and plausible deniability. It compares the Trump administration’s symbolic practices with those of Nazi Germany, including the use of superlatives and hyperbole so extreme it takes on a “fairy tale quality.” The chapter further identifies a favorite Trump discourse sequence here termed “reactive reversal,” related to the concept of “plausible deniability” discussed in a later chapter. First, Trump stakes out a hyperbolic claim, and if a public outcry follows, Trump reacts by reversing his claim and blaming others for their inference. Then he may triumphantly declare victory over whoever “really” claimed/did what he originally claimed. This is one of Trump’s methods of gauging reaction from the public.

Housed in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, the assiduously organized (and carefully curated) Coetzee Papers include manuscript drafts of Coetzee’s novels (formerly available at the Houghton Library, Harvard College), as well as notebooks, correspondence, teaching materials, and photographs. Only recently opened, this archive has prompted a new wave of critical studies, only some of which have been sufficiently alert to, or indeed sceptical of, the procedures and decisions involved in its establishment and organization. Reflecting on this, this chapter considers the provenance and particular character of these papers in light of Coetzee’s career-long quarrying of autobiographical materials, his project of self-archiving, his explorations of archival themes and use of archival energies in his fictions, and his particular interest in the nature of secrets and lies, of concealment, distortion, and revelation. It argues that it is vital that critics think carefully about their own purposes in reading the archives; about the writer’s purposes in producing them; and about the kinds of truth at stake in the works, the archives, and the literary criticism they occasion.

The introduction presents the book’s primary themes of truth, the postcolony, borders and violence. Situated in the historiography of African decolonisation, it emphasises the necessity of considering the emergence of the postcolony in the relationship between states and peoples, rather than through the relationship with the coloniser alone. It treats decolonisation as a search for certainty around what community and authority would mean in the postcolony, a process lasting far beyond the date of independence. Surveying approaches to citizenship as action and as words, it focuses on variations of political language in historiography and linguistic anthropology, and contextualises the setting of the book in literature on African borderlands and the ‘margins’ of the state. It provides preliminary observations on truth, truth-speaking and their role in official political speech and unofficial rumour in 1950s Burundi, while observing some common philosophical conceptions of the relationship between truth and violence. It then presents the methodologies employed, along with the practical and ethical questions concerning the focus on truth, and ends with an overview of the book.

This chapter considers when the government’s speech deprives its targets of life, liberty, or property in violation of the Due Process Clause. It starts with a brief tour of the government’s lies and other falsehoods, illustrating their wide array of audiences, topics, motives, and effects. It then examines the government’s speech that interferes with its listeners’ choices in ways that would violate the Due Process Clause if the government accomplished those same changes through its lawmaking or other regulatory action: examples include law enforcement officers’ lies that coerce their targets’ waiver of constitutional liberties and the government’s lies that deny their targets the ability to exercise reproductive or voting rights. Next, it turns to the expressive harms sometimes inflicted by the government’s speech, investigating whether the government’s speech that shames or humiliates its targets offends due process protections. Finally, it turns fromt the effects of the government's speech to its purposes, exploring whether the Clause limits the government’s speech motivated by its intent to interfere with protected liberties or to inflict injury.

This chapter considers when the government’s speech about others’ speech violates the First Amendment’s Free Speech or Free Press Clauses. It starts by exploring how the government’s speech can change, deter, or punish its targets’ speech: think of the government’s threats, disclosures, and designations that silence its targets’ speech, or its expressive attacks that incite or encourage third parties to punish its targets for their speech. It then examines the expressive harms inflicted by the government’s speech that disparages disfavored speakers, and whether that speech infringes Free Speech or Free Press Clause protections apart from any adverse effect on its targets’ choices and opportunities. Finally, turning from the consequences of the government’s speech about speech to its motives, it considers whether the Constitution prohibits the government’s expressive choices motivated by its intent to silence or punish speech to which it objects or its intent to interfere with the press's constitutionally protected functions. To illuminate the three approaches’ various strengths and limitations, the chapter closes by applying them to a range of problems both real and hypothetical.