Common Pretense

I invite my partner to have dinner with my friends; alas, she says, she has a meeting, can’t make it, what a shame. I pretend to believe this; my friends pretend to believe I believe this; I pretend to believe they believe this; my partner pretends to… (etc etc etc).

In fact, my partner just doesn’t like my friends very much, and we all sort-of know this: nobody is fooled by her excuse, and nobody is fooled about anyone else’s fooled-ness. But we all have (barely) plausible deniability: nobody is provably lying, or provably aware that someone else is lying, either.

There are many similar ideas in our conceptual lexicon, but to my knowledge there’s no name for this thing specifically.

Συνέχεια εδώ

Πηγή: atvbt.com