Lying, epistemic vigilance and relevance-theoretic comprehension strategies

This paper adopts the cognitive relevance-theoretic approach to communication and utterance comprehension (Sperber and Wilson, 1986 [1995]), with the focus on communicating the deceptive content. The aim of the paper is to examine the act of lying against hearers’ epistemic vigilance (Sperber et al., 2010) and to show how the three comprehension strategies described within Relevance Theory (Naïve Optimism, Cautious Optimism and Sophisticated Understanding, cf. Sperber, 1994) influence the comprehension process of deceitful utterances. We hope to demonstrate that the hearer’s choice of the strategies of Naïve Optimism and Cautious Optimism will help the liar to succeed in causing the audience to accept his false messages as true or internally and externally coherent as they both assume benevolence of the speaker, require fewer layers of metarepresentation than Sophisticated Understanding and combine with a lower degree of epistemic vigilance.