Abstract

In the literature about deceitful processes, a basic argument that suggests preferring misleading (deceiving someone by telling the truth) to successful lying (deceiving by false assertion) is that misled people are relatively free to select the true conversational implicature of what is said. So they are at least partially responsible for deceit. The article focuses on possible unfair implications of the idea, which is similar to the much discussed theory of victim-blaming (victims are held to be responsible for the crime of which they are victims). A «gradualistic» conception of epistemic inference is applied, to show that the thesis of victims' responsibility in deceptions by misleading is intuitively unfair because, most frequently, it is simply false.