Deception as Mimicry

Abstract

What is the nature of deception? What does it take for an organism to deceive another one? In this paper we address these questions by appealing to the concept of mimicry. More precisely, we argue that a fruitful perspective regards deception as an instance of mimicry rather than the reverse. Conceiving of deception as an instance of mimicry has a number of interesting consequences: it draws connections between different areas of research, it vindicates a functional approach to deception by providing a satisfactory answer to some recent objections, and it suggests some worries for game-theoretic approaches to deception.