This just seems like a Wittgensteinian Language Game crossed with the Symbol Grounding Problem. It's not so much that "lying can't exist" as "it is impossible to distinguish intentional deception from using different symbols". A person can confidently and truthfully state "two plus two equals duck" - all we need is for "duck" to be their symbol for "four". They're not "lying", or even "wrong" or "incoherent", their symbols are just different. Those symbols are incompatible with our own, but we don't "really" disagree. A different person could, alternatively, say "two plus two equals duck" and be intentionally deceiving - but there's nothing that can be observed about the situation to prove it, just by looking at a transcription of the text. There's also no way, exclusively through textual conversation, to "prove" that another person is using their symbols in the same way as you! Even kiki-bouba effects aren't universal - symbols can be arbitrary, once pulled out of their original context. If everyone's playing their own Language Game, shared maps are illusory - How Can Maps Be Real If Our Words Aren't Real?

P. rey consistently and unambiguously uses the symbol to mean "mating time". P. redator consistently and unambiguously uses the symbol to mean "I would like to eat you, please". Neither, in this language game, is lying to each other, or violating their own norms - but the same behaviour as above happens. Lying is just dependent on reference frame; just because there's a hole in one map doesn't open a hole in another. In any given example of "deception", we can (however artificially) construct a language game where everyone acted honestly. Lying isn't a part of what we can check on the maps here - it's an element of territory, in so far as we could only tell if someone was "really lying" if we could make direct neurological observations. Maybe not even then, if that understanding's some privileged qualia. The only time you can observe a lie with certainty is if you're the liar, as the only beliefs you can directly observe with confidence are your own.

The territory only contains signals, consequences, and benefits. Lying postulates about intention, which is unverifiable from the outside. That doesn't make "lying" meaningless, though - we can absolutely lie, and be certain that we lied - so it has meaning, but it's dependent on reference frame. When two people observe a relativistic object moving at different speeds, they can both provide truthful yet contradictory claims. When each claims the other "lied", in so far as they have their own evidence and certainty, it's a consequence of reference frame. Lying is centrifugal force, signals are centripetal. Both can be treated as real when useful for analysis. Hooray for compatibilism!

I'm glad you're bringing sender-receiver lit into this discussion! It's been useful for me to ground parts of my thinking. What follows is almost-a-post's worth of, "Yes, and also..."

Stable "Deception" Equilibrium

The firefly example showed how an existing signalling equilibrium can be hijacked by a predator. What once was a reliable signal becomes unreliable. As you let things settle into equilibrium, the signal of seeing a light should lose all informational content (or at least, it should not give any new information about whether or not the signal is coming from mate or predator). 

Part of the what ensures this result is the totally opposed payoffs of P.rey and P.redator. In any signalling game where the payouts are zero-sum there isn't going to be an equilibrium where the signals conveys information.

More complex varied payouts can have more interesting results:

Again, at the level of the sender-receiver game this is deception, but it still feels a good bit different from what I intuitively track as deception. This might be best stated as an example of "equilibrium of ambiguous communication as a result of semi-adversarial payouts"

Intention

I would not speculate on the mental life of bees; to talk of the mental life of bacteria seems absurd; and yet signalling plays a vital biological role in both cases.
-Skyrms

I want to emphasize that the sender-receiver model and Skyrms' use of "informational content" are not meant to provide an explanation of intention. Information is meant to be more basic than intent, and present in cases (like bacteria) where there seems to be no intent. Skyrms seems to be responding to some scholars who want to say "intent is what defines communication!", and like Skyrms, I'm happy to say that communication and signals seems to cover a broad class of phenomena, of which intent would be a super-specialized subset.

For my two-cents, I think that intent in human communication involves both goal-directedness and having a model of the signalling equilibrium that can be plugged into an abstract reasoning system.

In sender-receiver games, the learning of signalling strategy often happens either through replicator-dynamics or a very simple Roth-Erev reinforcement learning. These are simple mechanisms that act quite directly and don't afford any reflection on the mechanism itself. Humans can not only reliably send a signal in the presence of certain stimulus, but can also do "I'm bored, I know that if I shout 'FIRE!' Sarah is gonna jump out of her skin, and then I'll laugh at her being surprised." Another fun example is that seems to rely on being able to reason about the signalling equilibrium itself is "what would I have to text you to covertly convey I've been kidnapped?"

I think human communication is always a mix of intentional and non-intentional communication, as I explore in another post. When it comes to deception, while a lot of people seem to want to use intention to draw the boundary between "should punish" and "shouldn't punish", is see it more as a question of "what sort of optimization system is working against me?" I'm tempted to say "intentional deception is more dangerous because that means the full force of their intellect is being used to deceive you, as opposed to just their unconscious" but that wouldn't be quite right. I'm still developing thoughts on this.

Far from equilibrium

I expect it's most fruitful to think of human communication as an open system that's far from equilibrium, most of the time. Thinking of equilibrium helps me think of directions things might move, but I don't expect everyone's behavior to be "priced into" most environments.

I asked GPT-4 to write a "highly critical comment" in response to this post. It replied:

Zack M. Davis' blog post, "Maybe Lying Can't Exist?!", is a prime example of overcomplicating a simple concept with unnecessarily convoluted language and philosophical ramblings. Davis spends an inordinate amount of time discussing sender-receiver games, formal models, and the evolution of communication, only to conclude that deception is "ontologically parasitic." This statement is not only pretentious but also blatantly obvious. Of course, lying depends on the existence of a shared understanding of truth—it's a fundamental aspect of communication.

Furthermore, the post fails to address the key question it purports to explore—can lying exist? Instead, it meanders through a series of disjointed examples and arguments that don't contribute to a coherent conclusion. The discussion on fireflies, while interesting from a biological standpoint, adds little to the overall conversation about the nature of lying and deception.

Davis also claims not to care about "tidy formal definitions of English words," yet the entire post is dedicated to dissecting and analyzing the concept of deception. This contradictory stance only serves to confuse and frustrate the reader. It's as if Davis is intentionally obfuscating the subject matter, perhaps in an ironic attempt to deceive the reader themselves.

In short, this blog post is a prime example of pseudo-intellectual posturing. It is a convoluted exploration of a simple concept that adds nothing to our understanding of lying and deception. The author's verbose language and circular arguments only serve to mask the fact that they haven't actually said anything of substance. Instead of enlightening the reader, Davis only manages to create confusion and irritation.

I still think this is one of the best recent posts. Well-researched and well-presented, and calls into question some of my tacit assumptions about how words work.

I like the attempt to separate intent from effect. I don't think you've quite succeeded in this, though - you probably need new words - "deceptive", "lie", and the like are VERY entangled with common social judgement and signaling (which themselves are often map-manipulating uses).

It may also help to separate intent/causality of behavior at different times. P.redator is, presumably, evolved rather than using a cognitive model, but the lesson applies the same. It's adopted a behavior (mimicking P.rey's mating signal) BECAUSE it misleads P.rey. This adoption can be termed "deception", and once P.rey has adapted, continuing the behavior is less effective (but not zero, or P.redator would evolve not to pay the cost of the signal).

The impact side of deception is of course not binary. P.rey has a strong mating signal before P.redator takes advantage of it, but even after adaptation, P.rey now only has a weaker signal available. P.redator's behavior continues to add noise, even after P.rey "knows" about the lie.

Is the common-usage of "deception" equivalant to "injected noise with a causal tie from conflicting beliefs"? Perhaps - I haven't deeply considered counter-examples, and I'd like to add in the concept that if the deceiver is more powerful than the victim (can model the victim, and/or adapt faster), the deception is more than just noise, it's actually negative information.

In the scenario where both benefit from honest communication what their task is where they get the reward from doesn't need ot be same but can differ. If the task is different the action is probably different so they are probably also using different representations to process the information. It is an interoperable meaning but it doesn't need to be shared.

I was expecting a different concet to be formed. What I here now dub "exploitative communication" is when you could have sent a signal that would have resulted in more success to the receiver but instead you send a different signal that results in more success to you. This doesn't refer to beliefs. And it is clearer that defection can be separate from deception.

I wouldn't be that surprised if the main use case for deception would be exploitation. However in magic deception can be cooperative. And I think it would be hard to think that camouflage is some sort of lie but it is easier to think of it as exploiting a visual system for quiet. In a kind of hypnosis way the prey is asking the eye not to see it and it is complying because how expertly the ask was phrased. It is not that data is not received or processed but just that the outcome is favourable.

It wouldn't be that hard to call the twinkle a luring signal whter in the allure sense or fish lure sense. In that way both the mate and the predator use it to move the target to their proximity for their own advantage. The difference is that for the predator it is to the targets disadvantage.

What the selection is focused on is in action rather than beliefs althought if our agent manages actions via beliefs there might be a coupling. But the coupling need not exist.

(I haven't read any of the literature on deception you cite, so this is my unimformed opinion.)

I don't think there's any propositional content at all in these sender-receiver games. As far as the P.redator is concerned, the signal means "I want to eat you" and the P.rey wants to be eaten.

If the environment were somewhat richer, the agents would model each other as agents, and they'd have a shared understanding of the meaning of the signals, and then I'd think we'd have a better shot of understanding deception.