Tuesday 6 January 2015

Lying, Truth, and Truthfulness

Stephen Wright
I'm Stephen Wright, a lecturer at the University of Oxford. I completed my PhD at the University of Sheffield in 2014, I mainly work on issues in epistemology and the philosophy of language. Whilst my research is primarily in the epistemology of testimony, I have recently been thinking about philosophical issues concerning lying, in preparing a piece for the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Lying edited by Jörg Meibauer.

One of the questions at the centre of philosophical investigations into lying concerns what exactly lying is. In particular, I have been looking at the question of whether lying involves saying something that is untrue, or something that is untruthful. Put another way, the question is whether what I say can be a lie only if it is false, or if it merely seems to me that it is false.

Those that defend that idea that lying involves saying something untrue endorse the following claim:

(1) S’s statement that p is a lie only if p is false.

Thomas Carson (2010) endorses (1). According to Carson, someone’s statement is a lie only if it is false. The evidence for this comes from the observation that we cannot charge someone with lying once we find out that what she said was true. If you tell me that the portrait in the hall has been taken away and I accuse you of lying, it looks as though, when we go and check and find out that the portrait in the hall has in fact been taken away, I ought to retract my accusation.

Accounts that take lying to be a matter of saying something untruthful, rather than untrue, such as the recent one offered by Jennifer Saul (2012) endorse the following in place of (1):

(2) S’s statement that p is a lie only if S believes that p is false.

The idea is that what matters is not so much the truth or falsity of the speaker’s statement, so much as whether or not the speaker believes it to be true. For example, if I am attempting to conceal a fugitive in my house and I tell you that there is nobody hiding in my house, it seems that my statement is still a lie even if the fugitive has in fact escaped without me knowing it.

Of course, since (1) and (2) respectively only purport to state necessary conditions on lying, one might perfectly well endorse them both—they do not rule one another out. Indeed, this is Carson’s position. But many find (1) unintuitive for the reason given in the previous paragraph and I think there’s an intuitive reason to be suspicious of (2) as well.

The reason comes from a locus classicus in the literature concerning lying—Chisholm and Feehan’s (1977) discussion. Suppose that I tell you that there are robbers in the road. Chisholm and Feehan distinguish between two cases:

(i) I believe that there are no robbers in the road.

(ii) I believe that there ‘there are robbers in the road’ is false.

The idea is that, in (i) I believe the negation of what I say, whereas in (ii) I believe a ‘second-level’ about the proposition ‘there are robbers in the road’ which requires the concept of being false as applied to sentences.

Insofar as we can distinguish between (i) and (ii), I suggest that this distinction shows that we should not think that lying involves saying something that you believe to be false. It seems that you could perfectly well lie to somebody by saying the negation of something that you believe. If I believe that there are robbers in the road and I tell you that there are no robbers in the road, that would seem (to me) to be sufficiently untruthful to count as a lie.

8 comments:

  1. Thanks for the post! I take it that you think Saul and others in the untruthfulness camp should refine (2) to read as follows?

    (2') S’s statement that p is a lie only if S believes ~p

    Maybe one should also tack on "and the statement does not manifest a belief that p" in order to deal with strange questions about what to do with someone who inconsistently believes p and also believes ~p.

    My gut reaction is that the folk concept LIE is probably indeterminate, or that the English word 'lie' is probably polysemous. That is: sometimes competent English speakers deploy the word in such a way that (1) is implied but not (2'), and at other times they deploy the word in such a way that (2') is implied but not (1). (Indeterminacy/polysemy of this nature stands in the way of all sorts of attempted analytic decompositions and conceptual analyses.) This would explain the apparently inconsistent intuitions in the portrait and fugitive cases that you offer. Why think that a regimented language will have just a single notion of lying? Maybe we should have two different senses of 'lie': one that requires untruth, and another that requires untruthfulness. If that's right, there's no deep question about what it means for an utterance to count as a lie. Does anything hinge on our having only a single concept of lying?

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  2. Hi Richard,

    Thanks for your comment! It’s not quite the case that I’d want to fill out (2) in the way that you suggest. I didn’t get onto it in the post, but I think that one of the best ways of filling out (2) that I’ve seen in the literature comes from Roy Sorensen. He offers the following:

    (2*) S doesn’t believe that p.

    This is a more permissive approach than your (2’) – I wonder whether it might be too permissive. But as far as the untruthfulness condition goes, something like (2*) might do. I’ll give some thought to your (2’) though.

    And I’m also sympathetic that lies might form a disunified class. Another reason for thinking this comes from the idea of bald-faced lies, understood here as lies without the intention to deceive. When we try and factor in these things, it becomes hard to see what unifies lying. This point notwithstanding, the aim of recent papers on lying still tends to be to accommodate all of the various data points in the literature.

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  3. Hi Stephen,

    Thanks for the response! I considered (2*), but I rejected it because I think it's possible for a person to irrationally believe p and believe ~p, and that it would be possible for a such a person to lie. If the person believes ~p, consciously focusses their attention on the apparent truth of ~p, and then says p intending to deceive their interlocuter, I think they probably lie. Even if they believe that p (subconsciously, implicitly, etc.).

    I agree that even though I'm skeptical that the folk concept of lying will turn out to be a unified concept, it's worth working through the cases and trying to figure it out! Still, I have a really hard time seeing what factors will make intuitions about the portrait case and the fugitive case come out differently, because they're symmetrical in a lot of their formal features. (I have to say that my intuitions waver on both of these cases; I'm not sure about the robustness of the data points that are trying to be accommodated.)

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  4. If you're going to say something like "...p is a lie only if p is false", then you have to consider how you would know that p is true or false. I know objectivity debates can go on forever, but they impinge onto all sorts of other arguments, and (AFAIK) they won't go away. The only safe approach (I think) is to go with what the potential liar believes.

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  5. Hi Richard,

    So you're after something more than (2') as the complete account of the insincerity condition, right? You're after something that also factors in where the individual's focus is. I assume that you think that if someone focused on the apparent truth of p and said that p, then they wouldn't be lying?

    Pattern-chaser,

    Interesting, but why think the approach of going with what someone believes is any safer? That requires you to figure out what on earth they're thinking. Why should that be any easier than finding out whether p is true or false?

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  6. Hi Stephen,

    I don't think I'd want to build attentional focus into an account of lying; I don't think it's either necessary or sufficient. I brought it up only because, in order to show that (2*) gives the wrong results, I wanted to provide an intuitive case where a person believes p but the utterance ⌜p⌝ does not manifest the belief that p. The way I went about that was by telling a story full of a bunch of other details about where the utterance came from if not from a belief that p. One of the details in the story I chose appealed to the person focusing on the apparent truth of ~p. But that's not the only possible story I could have given. The focusing isn't necessary.

    Saying it's not sufficient is a little harder. I think you could probably have a person who believes p and believes ~p, who focuses on the truth of p, but yet who still lies when saying ⌜p⌝. You'd need to give some sort of story about why the belief that p doesn't manifest or generate the utterance. That's hard to do off the top of my head, but I don't see any reason in principle why such a story couldn't be told. Here's an attempt: perhaps earlier in the day the irrational person was focusing on the apparent truth of ~p and formed the intention to lie later in the day by saying ⌜p⌝. When confronted with their interlocuter, they say ⌜p⌝ out of a commitment to their prior plan and intention, and not out of the fact that they are struck by the apparent truth of what they are saying and their genuine belief in what they are saying.

    I don't know, my intuitions about whether this person is lying or not are rather shaky. But the point is that I wouldn't want to build focus into an account of the insincerity condition. Focus was just meant to guide intuitions about manifestation, so I think "manifestation" will do the job. Maybe this will work, and you don't need the bit about believing ~p:

    (2'') S’s statement that p is a lie only if the statement does not manifest a belief of S's that p

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  7. What of this--concerning Donald Trump and his claim the media deliberately is not reporting terrorist attacks to the public (from Kevin Drum at Mother Jones):

    If someone says something with no evidence, is it a lie? Please don't try to evade the question with a knowing reference to On Bullshit, either. Let's assume—because I'm a charitable guy—that Trump isn't affirmatively aware that there are no terrorist attacks that the media has ignored, and is deliberately saying the opposite. Let's assume, instead, that he just doesn't know, and said it because it sounded good.

    Is that a lie?

    From: http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/02/we-need-agree-set-rules-calling-something-lie

    Thank you!

    ReplyDelete
  8. What of this--concerning Donald Trump and his claim the media deliberately is not reporting terrorist attacks to the public (from Kevin Drum at Mother Jones):

    If someone says something with no evidence, is it a lie? Please don't try to evade the question with a knowing reference to On Bullshit, either. Let's assume—because I'm a charitable guy—that Trump isn't affirmatively aware that there are no terrorist attacks that the media has ignored, and is deliberately saying the opposite. Let's assume, instead, that he just doesn't know, and said it because it sounded good.

    Is that a lie?

    From: http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/02/we-need-agree-set-rules-calling-something-lie

    Thank you!

    ReplyDelete

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