Lies

Riccardo Orestano ha scritto che la semantica di 'segreto' "si alimenta e si compiace di oscurità e di silenzio, di profondità sotterranee e di nascondigli. Essa vive celata all'interno di grotte e di caverne, ama stare al chiuso e al riparo da occhi indiscreti e indagatori" (Orestano 1983, 24). Lo stile di Orestano è un po' pesante, ma ricco di suggestioni sulle origini e gli usi del termine. In effetti, la parola italiana 'segreto' deriva dal latino 'secretus', participio di 'secernere' che vuol dire "separare". Il fatto che tale voce verbale sia composta da due sintagmi che esprimono entrambi separazione suggerisce che il 'se' svolge una funzione iterativa. Per quanto riguarda il verbo 'cernere', è il caso di ricordare che esso significa "separare" anche nel senso di "setacciare", cioè "scegliere", "selezionare il rilevante", ciò che si ritiene utile per qualche scopo.

Abstract

In this paper, I give four examples of the scholarships, bursaries, and awards that are highly bureaucratic and secret. I seriously doubt that they take into account the passion, capacities, experience, and knowledge of an applicant. Indeed, the academic system bothers scarcely itself with explaining the reasons of rejection of an application while it is full of cliché answers and demagogic expressions that we can find in almost all administrative letters sent to those who are unreasonably rejected.
As a matter of fact, academic wealth and prestige, which stands over students and taxpayers, is neither under the criticism nor under any control to check its impartiality and fairness. In other words, the intellectuals of responsible for these wealth and prestige are abandoned to themselves to manage their own business. There is no appeal against their decisions at all. It is amazing insofar as the scholars – especially those who have monopolized academic wealth and prestige in the universities and research centers – do not stop telling us that we live in a democratic society in which the people are counterbalance against the abuse of power or authority by checking it. The secret distribution of academic wealth and prestige goes hand in hand with the shortage of research about this distribution whereby those who are not in mainstream of academic elites find themselves outside the game (i.e. academic capital).   
                 
Keywords: Scholarships, Bursaries, Awards, Bureaucracy, and Mafia

The Illustrious Kitchen-Maid" is one among many works by Miguel de Cervantes that are barely examined by critics and scholars and remain largely unknown to the general public to date. The few researchers that have perused this short novel usually dismiss it as a trite love story written to pander to tastes prevalent in sixteenth and seventeenth century Spain, yet TIKM is a very deceitful text: readers that do not delve beyond the novella's surface will never see past its romantic facade, and guileless researchers will become lost within its pages if they let themselves be seduced by its narrator and by what its characters claim to be.

In this revised entry (2015), I consider the latest attempts by philosophers to define lying, in particular those attempts to define lying according to which a lie involves both an assertion and a breach of faith (Complex Deceptionism), and those attempts to define lying in which an intent to deceive is not necessary for lying (Non-Deceptionism). I also say more about the traditional definition of lying, and the traditional definition of deception, and the attempts to expand the definition of deception to include negative deception (not adding to someone's stock of true beliefs) as well as positive deception (adding to someone's stock of false beliefs). Please note that I have not uploaded a copy of the article; click on the URL link above (plato.stanford.edu) to the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The encyclopedia entry is updated online every couple of years.

We introduce the taxicab game, related to the ultimatum game and Gehrig et al.’s (2007) yes/no game. The proposer makes an offer, and simultaneously sends a cheap talk message indicating (possibly falsely) the amount of the offer. The responder observes the message with certainty and the offer with probability p before accepting or rejecting the offer. We investigate versions with p = 0 and p = 0.5 along with the ultimatum game as a baseline. Intuition and a model comprising both standard economic agents and others who dislike inequity, lies and lying provide clear predictions that our experimental results support. As the likelihood increases of offers being seen, the offers themselves increase, messages over–state them less, and responders are more likely to accept (even when the offer is unseen). Also, responders are more likely to accept after truthful messages than after lies or when no message is sent.