Recent empirical work demonstrates that some instances of material deception are perceived by ordinary people as consent-defeating, whereas other instances are not. One hypothesized account of these divergent lay intuitions draws on the notion of “essence”: Roughly speaking, lies that pertain to the “core” or “nature” of a consented-to act are perceived as precluding consent, whereas lies that pertain to features that are “nonessential” or “collateral” to the act are perceived as compatible with consent. To assess this hypothesized account, an independent measure of “essence” – one that does not rely with problematic circularity on notions of consent – is needed. This chapter draws on an emerging cognitive science literature that deploys linguistic probes to investigate how people intuitively represent human action. Here, we will consider two such probes, the “by” test and the “basically doing” test, and observe that whereas the former predicts judgments of consent, the latter does not.