Political Bald-Faced Lies Are Performative Utterances

Truth is at the center of politics—specifically, when political bald-faced lies pass for truth. That is, certain groups of people behave according to them—behave as if the political bald-faced lies were true. How can this phenomenon be explained? The chapter argues that, to explain the phenomenon, we need to take political bald-faced lies to be performative utterances whose goal is to bring about a worldly state-of-affairs just in virtue of making the utterance. Unless we take political bald-faced lies to be performative utterances in this sense, we will not be able to explain how they pass for truth. Given this, the chapter argues that the performative view of political bald-faced lies is to be preferred over various other views such as the contempt for truth view, the deception view, and the value-signaling view. All of these alternative views fail to adequately account for how political bald-faced lies pass for truth.