Discourse Of Truth Research Articles

Scholastic Persuasion in Thomas Usk’s Testament of Love

Because Usk was executed as a self-serving traitor, his biography has encouraged readings that blame the Testament of Love’s textual vagaries on its author’s ulterior motives which seem incongruous with his choice of the Boethian Consolatio genre. Broadening “Boethian” to include Boethius’s logical works, however, reveals that Usk based his textual strategies on long-standing and respectable conventions of logical plausibility dating back to Aristotle and Cicero and widely used throughout scholastic disputation. Using these logical “Topics” to validate the discussion between Love and the narrator, Usk seeks to transfer validity from the text’s arguments to himself, the author, and recuperate his character. In doing so, he develops a pioneering English philosophical vocabulary, similar to that of Langland and the Lollards. Identification of Usk’s logical strategies provides insight into Usk’s audience, education, and milieu, and suggests that Usk may be fruitfully considered according to contemporary fourteenth-century discourses of truth, public service, and vernacular philosophy.

Truth and Illusion beyond Falsification: Re-reading On Truth and Lie in the Extra-Moral Sense

This essay clarifies Nietzsche's early views on truth and falsity by giving a systematic reading of On Truth and Lie in the Extra-Moral Sense. Contrary to the prevailing view in recent Nietzsche scholarship, I argue that Nietzsche, in TL, affirms neither truth as correspondence nor the inevitable falsification of the world by cognition. I show that where Nietzsche appears to affirm falsification, he is in fact giving a reductio ad abrurdum of truth as correspondence and the notion of objectivity on which it relies. Though I limit my discussion to TL, I engage the more general debate around falsification by showing that more than one sense of falsification is at work in Nietzsche's discussions of truth and cognition. I argue that by criticizing illusory conceptions of truth, essence, and objective knowledge, Nietzsche develops a conception of cognition that prefigures his later naturalistic and perspectival accounts of knowledge. Because of the clear links between the views sketched in the early essay and Nietzsche's later philosophical project, I conclude that TL sets out positions and a project that Nietzsche continues to develop and experiment with throughout his mature work.

Discourses of morality and truth in social welfare: the surveillance of British widows of the First World War

Drawing on Sarangi and Slembrouck's work on the language of State-sanctioned bureaucracy, this paper will explore one of the ways in which this developed in Britain in the early twentieth century. Looking in particular at the war widows' pension scheme as implemented under the Royal Warrant of 1916, this paper will explore how the first (financially) non-contributory pension, and the first specifically directed towards women in Britain, developed a system of State-sanctioned surveillance and parsimony that continues to this day. The data used draw upon a number of individual case studies, showing how the State saw part of its role as the obligation to subject women to scrutiny and judgement, making infidelity and misbehaviour grounds for the denial of their widows' pension. As this article will explore, a wide variety of agents positioned themselves as, in some way, responsible for the moral surveillance of widows and even the most gossipy reports appear to have been treated with some degree of seriousness. This article will illustrate how a “new” type of bureaucratic relationship developed between State and citizens in the early twentieth century that remains in place a century later.

The Platonic Poems of Katherine Philips

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)1. The Appeal of PlatonismKatherine Philips (1632-1664) wrote poems on the human and the divine in the language of early modern idealism. While her contemporary Anne Conway (1631-1679) engaged directly in philosophical debates through her correspondence with figures such as the Cambridge Platonist Henry More, Philips worked in a decorous lyrical mode. In 1671, Conway wrote a tract in which she challenged Cartesian dualism and Hobbesian materialism. Informed by a Platonic commitment to the contemplative life, distrust of the senses, and veneration of the triad of soul, world spirit, and the One, Philips's poetry also opposes the political and philosophical implications of mechanism. While Conway's tract was published posthumously in 1692 as the Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, Philips constrained the publication of her poetry during her lifetime to limit their apparent social (and perhaps intellectual) ambitions.1 A comparison of these two women's writings reveals how female intellectuals participated in philosophical controversy in this period, and forces us to reassess the term 'Platonic' as a descriptor of Philips's poetic meditations.Although Platonism was diffused throughout Christian theology, it was treated sceptically in the popular Protestant writing of the seventeenth century. Plato is cited in five of the thirty-seven best-selling religious tracts published in the late 1650s through 1670s, but not approvingly.2 Despite such scepticism, Platonic philosophy became increasingly popular in the mid-century, as intellectuals sought to reconcile scientific discovery with idealist concepts of nature and scriptural wisdom, and to provide new models of religious and political toleration. For its defenders, Platonic philosophy represented a means of achieving wisdom and happiness. Denying that the human condition was fearful and decrepit, Platonists viewed the absolute goodness of God as incompatible with Calvinist predestination. Writing in 1666, Samuel Parker argued that Platonists sensed their condition to be 'secure', 'as 'tis certain that Infinite Goodness cannot be angry with him, that has endeavoured with all faithfulness and diligence to know and do his Duty'. Platonism 'requires of us to act suitable to the Dignity of rational Beings, to keep up the Splendour and Grandeur of our Natures, and to scorn any Action that's unhandsome, or unworthy our Station and Quality ... It teaches us to imitate and resemble the Divine Perfections, to be God-like in Wisdom, and Justice.'3 As Carol Barash has argued, Philips's poetry drew on the femme forte tradition to construct models of female heroism in response to political events; but it should also be noted that Platonism itself, in its celebration of human dignity and the splendour of human nature as a mirror of divine goodness, articulated a form of personal heroism which could evade the particularities of temporal politics.4 And the emphasis of the Platonists on rationality rather than revelation - the Cambridge Platonists in particular contended that reason and the Bible were thoroughly reconcilable - represented a temperate intervention in mid-century British religious factionalism and enthusiasm.Platonic truth was also unaffected by its unpopularity. According to Benjamin Whichcote, 'the Universal Acknowledgment of a Thing for Truth doth not ly in every individual Person's receiving it ... but in the due and even Proportion it bears to the Universal Reason of Mankind'.5 The universal need not be adopted by all in order to be true: differences of opinion, even ideological defeat, could be accommodated without jeopardizing the truth discovered by the individual. As such, Platonism allowed writers like Philips - constrained not only by her rural location, but also by the shifting fortunes of the mixed Royalist and Parliamentarian affiliations of her family - to construct a discourse of honour, truth and beauty which could be fulfilled privately. …

Truth and Argument Evaluation

We are all familiar with the traditional conception of what makes for a good argument: that its premises are true and that it is valid.[1] That traditional view of the goodness of arguments has sustained serious criticism over the past few decades, so that most theorists have dropped either the validity requirement or the truth requirement or both. Almost all theorists that I am aware of take it that an argument is good if it fulfills its purpose, and it is widely agreed that arguments can fulfill their purpose even when not all of their premises are true, or they are not deductively valid. Still, some theorists retain a focus on the truth-directed nature of arguments, and those theorists rightly hold that, given such a focus, truth plays an important role in the evaluation of arguments. Johnson (2000) goes so far as to reintroduce truth as a constraint on premise adequacy, alongside the criterion of acceptability, and he holds that in a case where a premise is false but acceptable, truth (/falsity) outweighs acceptability. What I propose to do in this essay is to discuss the role that truth plays in the evaluation of arguments, when the purpose of arguments is understood as truth-directed in some important way. I begin with a discussion of truth and the purpose of arguments. In the second section of the paper, I give an argument to the effect that the theory of argument evaluation ought not to involve truth as a constraint on premise adequacy. The third section contains my argument for the positive claim that the proper place for the concept of truth is in the metatheory in terms of which the theory of evaluation is worked out.[2] I conclude the essay with a response to Hamblin’s (1970) argument that no arguments are truth-directed. [1] Hitchcock (1999) traces the concept of soundness in the textbook tradition to Black (1946), and before that (but with different terminology), to Cohen and Nagel (1934). [2] By "theory of evaluation" I mean the set of criteria that a theory provides us with for evaluating arguments. By "the metatheory" in terms of which the theory of evaluation is worked out, I mean the broader theory of argument, including reference to what it is that the criteria for argument evaluation are supposed to accomplish, in which the theory of evaluation is articulated.

Writing Captivity in the Early Modern Atlantic: Circulations of Knowledge and Authority in the Iberian and English Imperial Worlds (review)

Reviewed by: Writing Captivity in the Early Modern Atlantic: Circulations of Knowledge and Authority in the Iberian and English Imperial Worlds Pauline Turner Strong (bio) Lisa Voigt. Writing Captivity in the Early Modern Atlantic: Circulations of Knowledge and Authority in the Iberian and English Imperial Worlds. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2008. Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg. 352 pp. 5 illus., notes, index. ISBN 978-0807859445, $24.95. This theoretically sophisticated volume by a specialist in Iberian literature demonstrates the value of a broadly comparative approach to imperial representation. Astutely addressing the scarcity of serious considerations of Portuguese and Spanish narratives in the voluminous English-language scholarship on captivity, Lisa Voigt connects Iberian narratives of captivity in the New World both to their Anglo-American counterparts and to early modern accounts of Christians taken captive by Moors and Turks. The results of Voigt's disciplinary boundary crossing are salutary for scholarship on the representation of identity, alterity, and experience in both the Iberian and English imperial worlds. Considerably more centered on Iberia than on England, Writing Captivity in the Early Modern Atlantic includes close readings of the representation of captivity by three authors: the Peruvian historian el Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, the Chilean soldier Francisco Núñez de Pineda y Bascuñán, and the Brazilian friar José de Santa Rita Durão. The three case studies are framed by theoretical and comparative discussions of the circulation of representations of shipwreck and captivity throughout the early modern world. Voigt is particularly interested in the "valorization of the captive's authority and knowledge" (24) in works that predate the Scientific Revolution and the age of the novel. The focus on early claims to the authority of firsthand experience makes Writing Captivity relevant to readers interested in many forms of biographical and auto biographical writing, not only captivity narratives. Voigt opens the book with a general consideration of the connections between accounts of Old and New World captivity—connections exemplified in visual imagery, tropes, and epistemological practices that "traversed linguistic, national, and imperial borders as fluidly as the voyagers themselves" (47). In a chapter that moves from the well-known captivity narratives of Hans Staden (in Brazil) and Cabeza de Vaca (on the Gulf of Mexico) to tales of Algerian captivity in the novels of Cervantes, Voigt is particularly interested in the [End Page 560] interplay between discourses of truth and strangeness. She argues persuasively that "true histories" of shipwreck and captivity played an important role in the early modern "reconceptualization of versimilitude and the marvelous" (49). Another important theme of Writing Captivity is the "transformative power of captivity and the empowerment of the transformed captive" (105). The authors of each of Voigt's central captivity narratives—a Peruvian mestizo, a Chilean creole, and a Brazilian exile—were not all captives, but each was familiar with the travails and power of the cultural mediator. Garcilaso de la Vega, a descendant of Incan nobles, included a narrative of the captivity of Juan Ortiz in his La Florida del Inca, published in Lisbon in 1605. Captured in Florida in 1528 by the indigenous chief Hirrihigua, Juan Ortiz was, according to Garcilaso, saved from torture and death by the intervention of the chief's wife and daughters. Taken under the protection of a neighboring chief, Mucozo, Ortiz served as an intermediary between the chief and Hernando de Soto when the latter arrived in Florida in 1539, eventually becoming a guide and interpreter for the Soto expedition. Also exemplifying the transformative and empowering nature of captivity is Francisco Núñez de Pineda y Bascuñán's account of his "happy captivity" in 1629 among the Mapuche (or Araucanians) of Chile. A hybrid of personal memoir and political tract, Pineda's book-length manuscript (unpublished until the nineteenth century) contains numerous digressions, including examples of Spanish treachery and cruelty that Pineda viewed as key to the continuation of Mapuche hostilities against the Spanish. As a captive, Pineda came to construct what Voigt calls a "creole identity and authority" (172)—a process that involved destabilizing boundaries between the "civilized" and the "barbarous," followed by drawing new boundaries that incorporated...

Accounting to myself: How do I speak for myself, to myself, as I encourage others to do the same?

This article is an account of my ongoing action enquiry into how I can understand and improve my practice. It is a continuation of an earlier paper (McNiff 2008a), delivered originally as a keynote presentation at the SAARDHE 2007 Conference, University of Pretoria, where I made the case that the ‘I’ should be central in educational research; that academics located in higher education should reconceptualise themselves as intellectuals whose job is challenge existing ideas and practices as a means of contributing to the development of an open society (Popper 1945); and for the maintenance of a free academic press to enable them to publish their accounts of how they are doing so. I develop some of these themes here, showing how I act as a living example of ideas to do with the generative transformational nature of living processes, including forms of enquiry, whose existence is facilitated through the capacity of the thinker to problematise and deconstruct his/her own thinking. I raise questions about how I can account for myself to myself, drawing on Foucault’s (2001) discussion of parrhesia – frank and truthful talk – as a means of showing how a morally accountable life can be understood as one in which the individual is able to speak the truth to others, and, more importantly, to themselves, thus addressing Foucault’s question: I wish to know how the reflexivity of the subject and the discourse of truth are linked – “How can the subject tell the truth about itself?” (cited in McNicol Jardine 2005).

Affects

My aim in this editorial is to propose an alternative model of identities in opposition to the culturalist account of identities in an attempt to (re) think notions of [cultural] identities through recourse to the idea of affects. (1) In a culturalist account, identities are often defined in terms of race, class and gender. And we have already produced numerous theoretical models to approach politics and and their effectivity over the formation of subjectivity as effects of narrative seeing history ... as a kind of production of various kinds of narratives. (2) But here I am attempting to approach subjectivity from the idea of 'noncultural'/'nonnarrated' reality of affects, neither taking any airy transcendentalist turn nor adopting the point of view of any misty crust of cultural universalism, but rather from the position of Spinozian ethics of immanence. (3) My sense of 'noncultural' does not deny culture rather expands its horizon opening new fields for [cultural] individuations; rather helps to analyze the content and expression of culture. Additionally, I am also trying to introduce Spinozian view point of affects as a can-be new approach to analyze postcolonial/transnational bodies of literature. What is wrong with the representationalist account of cultural individuations? How can my alternative model of [cultural] identities save an idealistic/humanistic mission for society? These are the two major questions I am intending to address. To start with the first question, I disagree with the idea that who am I is based on in which ethnicity, in which nationality, in which political, religious, ethical systems I grew up. I am not a representation of the summations of these social and geographical abstractions, nor am I the effects of narratives under certain regimes of power. I am a pure, pre-extensive spatium in intelligible extension. (4) My intelligible extension is grounded in the real world where I encounter not the clear and distinct ideas or causations and effects of some conceptual abstractions that we call narratives of ideology, politics and truth but physical affects and affections (5) that my body produces with another body. And my intelligibility of the world cannot be adequately mediated either through any conceptual abstraction. I am my affective investment to the world. In other words, the content of my identity is not the idea of some conceptual abstractions, but rather the expressive power of my body. My body is an immanent force, which encounters other forces in the world and shapes what is in me and possibly cause to shape what is in others. I am a force, a new emergence within me all the time. That emergence is a purely process: an appreciative activity and vitality and it is affirmative will-to-create new individuations. I am not like deorganizing the organic (6) in any ossified representations. I am neither deorganic representation of any abstract stratifications that people name culture, history, etc., nor am I effects of discursive formation, as Foucault for instance thinks . I am the body not a de-organic formation of effects of some social production. Body is generative organism which creates affects and affections, which, even culturalist like Marcus admits, are structured around our social institutions. Body is not irreducible to any external disciplinary practices as Foucault maintains when he says: True discourse, liberated by the nature of its form from desire and power, is incapable of recognising the will to truth which pervades it; and the will to truth, having imposed itself upon us [body] for so long, is such that the truth it seeks to reveal cannot fail to mask it. (7) For Foucault, my body is acted upon, and some external abstraction which he calls discourse acts. This is just Foucault in his later works does not believe, a point that supports my claim here. My body acts upon other bodies. In its active investment to the world, it either enters into compositional or decompositional relationship with other bodies. …

Between thinking and speaking—Linguistic tools for detecting a fabrication

This study describes the linguistic differences between the discourse of truth and discourse whose objective is to mislead. 1 1 The details of the research presented here may be found in my doctoral dissertation: Rakefet Dilmon, Linguistic differences between lie and truth in spoken Hebrew, written in fulfillment of the requirement for the granting of the Doctor of Philosophy degree, Bar Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel, 2004. The intention to mislead arouses cognitive and emotional functions in the speaker that affect his speech. An examination of the linguistic characteristics that distinguish between the discourse of truth and that of invention among 48 native Hebrew speakers who were asked to tell both true and invented stories found 13 criteria that differentiate between the two types of discourse. The criteria were classified according to the cognitive and emotional functions affecting the speaker, also addressing his level of awareness of these functions. The objective of this paper is to demonstrate the effectiveness of the linguistic examination in differentiating between truth and deception. This effectiveness is due to the uncontrollable psychological processes that cause differences between the discourse of truth and invention. The results may enable us to construct an instrument for linguistic examination to differentiate between the two types of discourse.

'Now Farewell to the Lawe, too long have I been in thy Subjection': Early Modern Murder, Calvinism and Female Spiritual Authority

A True Discourse of the practices of Elizabeth Caldwell (1604) is a prose murder pamphlet narrating its eponymous ‘heroine's’ attempted murder of her husband and her subsequent trial and execution. Early modern Calvinist theology is used to interpret the narrative and expose interlocking patterns of subjection and authority which invest Elizabeth Caldwell's words (spoken and written) with a spiritual power conventionally denied to women in this period. That such power comes at a lethal price—the articulation of her authority is permissible only as she moves towards the silence of death—is one of the many paradoxes revealed by a close analysis of the pamphlet writer's rhetorical strategies, themselves based on the Calvinist generic narrative framework of early modern prose murder pamphlets. The printed text has, however, overcome the silence imposed by her execution, leaving its articulation of female spiritual authority poised between the imaginative and experiential realms, subject finally to the interplay between writers, readers and genre.

1948 After Oslo: Truth and Reconciliation in Palestinian Discourse

The failure of the Oslo Accords has been widely attributed to its exclusion of issues of truth and reconciliation from the political process. As a result, the period since the Accords has witnessed a resurgence of the status of memory in Palestinian discourse, manifested in increasing commemorations of the Palestinian nakba and oral history projects. The article examines this upsurge of memory and ‘truth and reconciliation’ as political idioms in the discourse of Palestinian intellectuals, historians and civil society organizations. It examines the key means whereby the public acknowledgement of Palestinian and Israeli collective memories of violence in 1948 have been increasingly cast as preconditions for the endurance of any political order. It argues that the most sustainable Palestinian truth and reconciliation discourse is that which calls both for Israel to acknowledge responsibility for the creation of the refugee problem and for Palestinians to actively engage with the means whereby Israelis might be brought to recognize the necessity of an apology for it.

The Voting Audience

The Voting Audience

The Voting Audience

The Voting Audience

Divine Anonymities: On Transascendence and Transdescendence in the Works of Levinas, Celan, and Lispector

AbstractThose points at which Emmanuel Levinas's later work touches on the question of God express a profound ambiguity. Here it is often the case that theism becomes indistinguishable from atheism, ethics is shown to be indistinguishable from religion and, to cite two important concepts invented by Levinas, il y a (lit., “there is;” denotes bare, senseless material existence) becomes indistinguishable from illeité (lit., “it-ness;” denotes the absolute distance or anonymity of God). While Levinas insists upon a measure of ambiguity or enigma in all truthful religious discourse, these series of ambiguities are often covered over by Levinas's ethical project as soon as they appear. With the aid of two deeply philosophical writers in whose work we find literary analogues of the ambiguities thematized in Levinas—the poet Paul Celan and the novelist Clarice Lispector—this paper offers a critique of Levinas's thin, often moralistic, concepts of alterity and transcendence. The critique proceeds by showing how Celan and Lispector demonstrate the consequences of thinking the anonymity of God and the corresponding undecidability of the most-high and the most-low (i.e., transascendence and transdescendence) to its logical conclusion. In the process, Celan and Lispector emerge as original religious thinkers in their own right, not merely as counterweights to Levinas.

Narrative and the construction of `truth' in a prison-based treatment program for sexual offenders

This article examines the conflict that ensues over the meaning of `truth' in a treatment program for imprisoned sexual offenders. Based on ethnographic research in a prison hospital, extensive interview and observational data are employed to demonstrate the pervasiveness of truth discourse in both treatment and everyday living on the unit. Through the application of a narrative analytic framework, it is argued that the inherent incompatibility between autobiography and disclosure — or narrative and paradigmatic modes of thought, to use Bruner's (1986, 1991) terms — explains how and why inmates struggle to accept the re-emplotment of their life stories demanded by treatment staff.

Kourouma, the Myth: The Rhetoric of the Commonplace in Kourouma Criticism

In winning so many prestigious literary prizes on the international scene, Ahmadou Kourouma achieved in his lifetime what most African writers can only dream of: notoriety, superstardom, impressive book sales, a mythical stature. This study examines the underpinnings of Kourouma's status by analyzing the scholarly and journalistic reception of his works as inventoried through the Klapp bibliography. It offers an important background for better understanding the rhetoric that sustains the myth while raising very interesting guiding questions. For if Kourouma is elevated to the rank of Great Innovator of literature, is he read as such, and does this revolution in African letters that he embodies also extend to critical discourse? When the novelist writes differently, is the reader (general or scholarly) inclined and obliged to read differently? What has been the consequence on Kourouma's writings of the spectacular reversal from a Eurocentric view of African literature to an Afrocentric perspective? Have Kourouma's works not suffered paradoxically from the laudatory scholarly reception because of its overemphasis on realism and truthfulness? Is the truth discourse, which feeds such reception, not contributing to minimizing the literariness of Kourouma's writings?

Interviewer practice in investigative interviews for suspected child sexual abuse

Objective: The aim of the research was to analyse interviewer practice in investigative interviews, concentrating on features other than the type of questions asked. Method: Transcripts of 70 videotaped Memorandum interviews from England and Wales were coded using a specifically developed scheme. Children were aged from under 7 to 12 years. Aspects of interviewer practice that were recorded included implementation of the different phases of the interview, interviewer distortions, and other problematic interviewer behaviours, e.g. excessive familiarity, inappropriate disbelief, etc. Results: A number of problems were noted in the transcripts. Rapport, closure and free narrative phases varied in the degree to which they were present, and in their quality even when included. Discussions of truth and lies in the rapport phase were at a basic level that did not include intention to deceive. Over half the sample included interviewer distortions, and other instances of problematic behaviours were also noted. Conclusions: The results of the study support and extend earlier research, and suggest a number of areas requiring attention. The importance of interviewer training is highlighted, and further discussion is required as to why such training does not appear to be implemented in practice.

Biopower Today

In this article we undertake some conceptual clarification of the concepts of biopower and biopolitics, and argue for their utility in contemporary analysis. We consider Foucault's development of these concepts, and differentiate his view, which is close to ours, from the philosophical take-up of the terms by Giorgio Agamben and Antonio Negri. Biopower, we suggest, entails one or more truth discourses about the ‘vital’ character of living human beings; an array of authorities considered competent to speak that truth; strategies for intervention upon collective existence in the name of life and health; and modes of subjectification, in which individuals work on themselves in the name of individual or collective life or health. We argue that, while exceptional forms of biopower, especially in conditions of absolutist dictatorship, and when combined with certain technical resources, can lead to a murderous ‘thanatopolitics’—a politics of death—biopower in contemporary states takes a different form. It characteristically entails a relation between ‘letting die’ (laissez mourir) and making live (faire vivre)—that is to say strategies for the governing of life. Using examples from our own current research, we consider recent developments in biopower around three themes: race, population and reproduction, and genomic medicine.

‘Truth in Advertising’: The Impossible Dream?

For an industry that deals with the public perception of images, it perhaps ironic that advertising itself has long suffered from a severe image problem. The industry has long been equated with exaggerations, distortions and falsities. Critics and the industry alike have looked to the possibility of truth in advertising to redeem its reputation. The discourse of truth in advertising that occurred in the advertising industry ranks during the early twentieth century provides a revealing insight into the way that the ‘magic system’ of advertising has been constructed. Reaching a high point in the 1920s, concerns about truth would recede over the course of the 1930s and 1940s as the industry moved to embrace new forms of technology. By examining the rise and fall of this discourse, this paper reveals the advertising industry's fervent desire to improve advertising's status whilst illustrating the way in which technological developments not only affected the industry, but also its ability to ever be completely truthful.

The Dynamic Nature of Deceptive Verbal Communication

Past research on verbal deception has found inconsistent patterns, possibly due to failure to consider the dynamic nature of interpersonal deception. The current investigation examined temporal changes and sequencing effects in truthful and deceptive responding on 23 linguistic measures. Interviewees responded to 12 questions during which they alternated between giving blocks of truthful and blocks of deceptive answers. Results showed significant variability in verbal behavior across the course of the interviewon virtually all measures. Deceptive responding differed from truthful responding depending on the truth-deception sequence and the phase of the interview. The truth-first order made it much easier for deceivers to approximate truthful discourse sooner. The existence of significant variability due to time and sequence has important implications for identifying reliable indicators of deception and for research paradigms used to investigate deceptive and truthful discourse.