Words in the way of truth: truthfulness, deception lying across cultures and disciplines

The book explores the concepts of truthfulness and deception from a theoretical and multidisciplinary point of view, irradiating from that of pragmatics to its neighbouring disciplines of linguistic philosophy, cultural and social anthropology, critical discourse analysis, sociolinguistics. etc. Its perspective throughout is inter- and cross-cultural. Besides the theoretical exploration of truthfulness within pragmatics and the invited implications of seeing definitions and perceptions of truthfulness and deception in contextual perspective (whether social, interpersonal or cultural) - it is ultimately also concerned with awareness raising for intercultural interaction and cross-cultural communication; the raising of mindfulness to avoid complacent certainty of assumptions in local (including industrialized ‘Western’ ) folk theories of language use; assumptions as basic as that of what constitutes truthfulness, on which level of meaning it is to be evaluated, and its place in different circumstances in communication. This is considered especially important with the increase in the global use of (supposedly lingua franca) English and the consequent potential danger that monolingual/-cultural and ethnocentric Anglo definitions and perceptions of truthfulness simply become uncritically hegemonic.
The book consists of a Foreword, nine Chapters, three Appendices, a detailed Subject and Author index and an Extensive Bibliography.
Brief Chapter summaries:
Chapter One (‘Opening the Way’) gives a general overview of the issues across various disciplines, distinguishing crucially between the notions of and the different concerns with truth, truthfulness and truth-telling in the various literatures, and the polysemy and ambiguity of the term truthfulness in lay English, and across and within academic disciplines.
Chapter Two (‘Engaging Ways with truthfulness and deception in pragmatics’) examines the role (and history) of truthfulness as an underlying principle or assumption in the fields of theoretical pragmatics and philosophy for the coordination of mutual understanding, and in descriptive and societal pragmatics engaged in the unmasking of the various types of manipulation of truthfulness (through terminology and or other discourse means).
Chapter Three (‘More Ways than One. Types of Truthfulness and Non-truthfulness’) lays out the different parameters and dimensions (levels of interpretation) which distinguish the different types of truthfulness and non-truthfulness focusing especially on intentionality, to distinguish between physiological (indeterminate, figurative, indirect, etc), intentional, non-intentional, and intentionally deceptive non-truthfulness, and in cross-cultural perspective highlighting the notion of non-truth-relevant discourse worlds or contexts.
Chapter Four (’Following the Gricean Way’) is a methodological exercise on generating types of non-truthfulness by different ways of failing to fulfill the Gricean Cooperative Principle categories, maxims and sub-maxims.
Chapter Five (‘Getting in the Way of Truth. Deception and Lying’) focuses entirely on the intentionally non-truth-telling meaning of non-truthfulness, i.e. on lying and deception. It sets out and explores the different parameters of categorization and types of classification of deception to be found, variously concentrated on the whats, hows, whys, what fors and how bads of deception (often confusingly without distinguishing between the parameters).
Chapter Six (‘Goals along the way to deception’) lays out the application of the Italian goals analysis model, ‘scopistica’, to the classification of ways of deception (first developed in 1977 by the author in collaboration with ‘scopistica’ ideat