ABSTRACT
In Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein maintains that lying is a language-game that needs to be learned. John Searle has criticized this categorization on the grounds that one learns to lie in learning how to tell the truth, and not as a distinct language-game. Wittgenstein's explication of the philosophical grammar of lying is not to be found in the Investigations, but in his Lectures on Philosophical Psychology 1946–47, where lying is interpreted in terms of motive. The idea that telling lies may be a special language-game with rules of philosophical grammar is an intriguing suggestion. Wittgenstein's classification of lying as a language-game meshes nicely with his treatment of language-games as purposive activities embedded in the praxeological context of a form of life in which linguistic and extralinguistic practices are deeply intertwined. Against the incorporation of lying into the family of Wittgenstein's language-games, however, John R. Searle in Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech.
