Generalized deception, pragmatics and argumentation

Abstract

This work seeks to contribute to the conceptual clarification of the group of linguistic and psychological behaviours of self-deception, deception, lies and manipulation, which are grouped here under the umbrella of generalized deception. These distinctions will allow us to analyze pragmatically and argumentatively the agent’s attempts to justify and convince an audience by using those behaviours. In order to achieve the conceptual distinctions and the analysis of the cases, approaches from cognition, evolutionary theory, pragmatics and argumentation theory are discussed. Specifically, these theoretical and analytical tools are applied to two cases in which the social influence bias mobilizes an argumentative behaviour where one or several members of the generalized deception family are observed in use. The results show that within such a context, the agent gives justifications that are self-deceptive and deceptive, and tries to convince with irrelevant and insufficient arguments that configure a manipulative scenario.