Lie
From Free net encyclopedia
To tell a lie is to deliberately make a untrue declarative statement to another person. In other words, to say something one believes to be false, with the intention that the other person will be misled and believe it true, and with the intention that the other person wrongly believe that the teller also believes it to be true.
A lie involves the use of conventional truth-bearers (ie, statements made by words or symbols) and not natural signs. Intentional deception involving natural signs, such as wearing a wig, shamming a limp, or wearing a fake arm cast, is not usually classed as "lying", but as "deception".
A true statement may be presented as a lie. If relevant deceptive intentions are present to make the statement appear false even though the statement is true, then this is an example of lying. However, if one who makes the true statement genuinely believes it to be false, this is rather a genuine "mistake" and must not be confused with lying. When a person lies they are necessarily being untruthful, but they are not necessarily making a false statement.
A lie-to-children is an expression that describes a form of simplification of material for consumption by children. It is itself a simplification of certain concepts in philosophy of science. A white lie is a lie which is believed harmless or innocuous, or in is accordance with the conventions of the culture. Lying by omission means allowing another to believe something that one knows is false, by concealing the full truth, rather than by stating an untruth. Perjury is the legal term for the offence of lying under oath, for example in court or in an affidavit. It is normally restricted to lies that are also false statements.
Definitions
Some have held that various other forms of intentional deception should be counted as telling lies. Hence the expression "lie of omission" or "concealment lie". This is when a person refrains from making some statement or statements, with the intention that another person believe a false statement to be true, produced entirely by the person doing the refraining. However, it is interesting to note that special expressions have had to be coined to refer to these so-called "lies". This suggests that these acts of omission are not lies, but rather may be consider as strategic positioning of truth. An example is omitting in conversation to one's boss that one has stolen as a child, This prevents the boss from making misjudgements about his employee's present day behavior. In contrast, one may not necessarily need to omit this to one's mother or close friend.
A person who speaks or verbalizes a lie, and especially a person who habitually tells lies, is a liar. Omitting the truth by remaining silent may at times prevent one from speaking a lie. One may omit a statement of truth such as in the example that one stole as a child, giving another person a false impression that one did not steal as a child in order to prevent an authority figure such as a boss from misperceiving or misjudging them to be a thief as an adult when they are not. An omission or silence that has only the consequence of preventing illusion or misjudgement cannot truly be considered a lie. However, if the intent of omission in this example is to steal from one's boss, then this form of omission may be considered as a true lie of consequence. An omission that has the intent and consequence of producing further fraud or deception is in effect a lie.
Social customs in some cultures distinguish lies as such, from White lies, lies-to-children and other simplifications and customarily accepted face-saving manners of speech. Thus what is deemed a lie socially, both spoken and through omission, is often a product of culture as much as a product of truthfulness.
Morality of lying
The philosophers Saint Augustine, as well as Thomas Aquinas and Immanuel Kant, prohibited all lying. According to all three, there are no circumstances in which one may lie. One must (unfortunately) be murdered, suffer torture, etc., rather than lie, if the only way to protect oneself is to lie. One must (unfortunately) allow others to be murdered, to suffer torture, etc., rather than lie, if the only way to protect them is to lie. Note that each of these philosophers believed in an afterlife in which the virtuous would be rewarded.
Each of these philosophers gave several arguments against lying, all compatible with each other. Among the more important arguments are:
(1) Lying is a perversion of the natural faculty of speech, the natural end of which is to communicate the thoughts of the speaker.
(2) When one lies, one undermines trust in society.
(3) When one lies, one uses the humanity of another person as a mere means to one's end -- one bypasses the person's rationality and in effect makes a decision for the other person, instead of allowing the other person to use her/his own rationality and make her/his own decision.
(4) When one lies, one uses humanity in oneself as a mere means to one's ends.
Some philosophers have argued that lying is not prohibited in certain circumstances, such as when telling a lie will save an innocent life. They have in mind here such circumstances as lying to Nazis in WWII that there are no Jewish children in one's house. Some philosophers have also argued that paternalistic lying, or lying for the good of those lied to, is justified, even if it violates their autonomy. They have in mind here a case such as that of lying to someone who is terminally ill that he is not terminally ill.
Lying distinguished from biasing
In his book On Bullshit (2005; first published as an essay in 1986), Harry Frankfurt suggests that lying and bullshitting are not the same thing. A liar differs from a truth-teller in that the former wants to hide the truth while the latter wants to reveal it; but both are very much aware of what the truth is. A liar must remain mindful of the truth, if only so that he does not inadvertently reveal it. A biaser, however, is utterly indifferent to the truth. He would not mind if his statements turn out to be true. For example, a bank robber who denies that he robbed the bank is a liar; but a car salesman who assures a buyer, without bothering to check, that the car he is trying to sell has been driven only 10,000 miles is a bullshitter. The salesman would not care if it were to turn out that his claim is true after all. He simply does not care what is the truth of the matter.
Frankfurt acknowledges that "humbug", as discussed in Max Black's "The Prevalence of Humbug" (1985), is close in meaning to bullshit.
Etiquette of lying
Although lies are normally condemned, it is also normally believed that some lies are worse than other lies. In particular, lies that are believed to be harmless lies are often called "white lies" or "fibs".
Augustine divides lies into eight kinds: lies in religious teaching; lies that harm others and help no one; lies that harm others and help someone; lies told for the pleasure of lying; lies told to "please others in smooth discourse"; lies that harm no one and that help someone; lies that harm no one and that save someone's life; and lies that harm no one and that save someone's "purity". Importantly, however, Augustine holds that "jocose lies" are not, in fact, lies.
Thomas Aquinas divides lies into three kinds: the useful, the humorous and the malicious. All are sinful according to Aquinas. Humorous and useful lies, however, are venial sins. Malicious lies are mortal sins.
Paradox of lying
Lying is the subject of many paradoxes, the most famous one being known as the liar paradox, commonly expressed as "This sentence is a lie," or "This sentence is false." The so-called Epimenides paradox — "All Cretans are liars," as stated by Epimenides the Cretan — is a forerunner of this, though its status as a paradox is disputed. A class of related logic puzzles are known as knights and knaves, in which the goal is to determine who of a group of people is lying and who is telling the truth.
Psychology of lying
The capacity to lie is noted early and nearly universally in human development. Evolutionary psychology is concerned with the theory of mind which people employ to simulate another's reaction to their story and determine if a lie will be believable. The most commonly cited milestone, what is known as Machiavellian intelligence, is at the age of about four and a half years, when children begin to be able to lie convincingly. Before this, they seem simply unable to comprehend that anyone doesn't see the same view of events that they do - and seem to assume that there is only one point of view—their own—that must be integrated into any given story.
Young children learn from experience that stating an untruth can avoid punishment for misdeeds, before they develop the theory of mind necessary to understand why it works. In this stage of development, children will sometimes tell fantastic and unbelievable lies, because they lack the conceptual framework to judge whether a statement is believable or even to understand the concept of believability.
When children first learn how lying works, they lack the moral understanding to refrain from doing it. It takes years of watching people lie and the results of lies to develop a proper understanding. Propensity to lie varies greatly between children, some doing so habitually and others being habitually honest. Habits in this regard are likely to change into early adulthood.
Some view children as on the whole more prone to lie than adults. Others argue that the amount of lying stays the same, but adults lie about different things. Certainly adult lying tends to be more sophisticated. A lot of this judgment depends on whether one counts tactful untruths, social insincerity, political rhetoric, and other standard adult behaviors as lying.
- See also: Lie-to-children
"Lie-to-children"
Because life and its aspects can be extremely difficult to understand without experience, to present a full level of complexity to a student or child all at once can be overwhelming. Hence elementary explanations tend to be simple, concise, or simply "wrong"—but in a way that attempts to make the lesson more understandable. (Sometimes the lesson can be qualified, for example by claiming "this isn't technically true, but it's easier to understand.") In retrospect the first explanation may be easy to understand for its inaccuracies, but it will be replaced with a more sophisticated explanation which is closer to "the truth". This "tender introduction" concept is an important aspect of education.
Such statements are not usually intended as deceptions, and may, in fact, be true to a first approximation or within certain contexts. For example Newtonian mechanics, by modern standards, is factually incorrect (as it fails to take into account relativity or quantum mechanics) but it is still a valuable and useful model in many situations. One particular progression of "lies" or simplifications, each of which are debunked or unraveled as one progresses deeper into a subject (in this case, physics), runs as follows (from h2g2 <ref>{{cite web
| url = http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A685055 | title = Lies, Damned Lies, and Science Lessons | work = h2g2 | publisher = BBC }}</ref>):
- Weight is constant.
- Children in primary school learn that the weight of something doesn't change if the shape is changed.
- Weight is not a constant. What is actually constant is mass.
- In secondary school, teenagers often learn that on the moon or on Mars, an object's weight will be different, because gravity in those places is different, but the mass will stay the same.
- Mass is not a constant, but depends on the velocity of the object, relative to the speed of light in a vacuum, which is a constant.
- Later on, university students find out that relativity says that the mass of an object can vary depending on velocity.
The term appeared in the book The Science of Discworld <ref>{{cite book
| title = The Science of Discworld | first = Terry | last = Pratchett | authorlink = Terry Pratchett | coauthors = Stewart, Ian; Cohen, Jack | id = ISBN 0091886570 }}</ref>,
co-authored and partly based on ideas created by Terry Pratchett, and in Collapse in Chaos and Figments of Reality, both by the other two co-authors of The Science of Discworld, Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen.
Other lies to children may include cultural or religious-oriented myths (Santa Claus, Easter Bunny, Greek legends, Davey Crockett, Robin Hood), and emotionally loaded or complex subjects such as sex education and death.
There is considerable debate as to the ethics of these, and the boundary where cultural transmission, protectiveness and appropriateness, become an "outright lie", and how such subjects should be approached.
See also: Naïve physics
Deception and lies in other species
The capacity to lie has also been claimed to be possessed by non-humans in language studies with Great Apes. One famous case was that of Koko the Gorilla; confronted by her handlers after a tantrum in which she had torn a steel sink out of its moorings, she signed in American Sign Language, "cat did it," pointing at her tiny kitten. It is unclear if this was a joke or a genuine attempt at blaming her tiny pet. Deception or misleading as to intent is well documented in other social species such as wolves.
Sociology and linguistics of lying
George Lakoff, in criticizing some claims of George W. Bush made prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, notes that:
Are they lies—or are they merely exaggerations, misleading statements, mistakes, rhetorical excesses and so on? Linguists study such matters. The most startling finding is that, in considering whether a statement is a lie, the least important consideration for most people is whether it is true! The more important considerations are, Did he believe it? Did he intend to deceive? Was he trying to gain some advantage or to harm someone else? Is it a serious matter, or a trivial one? Is it "just" a matter of political rhetoric? Most people will grant that, even if the statement happened to be false, if he believed it, wasn't trying to deceive, and was not trying to gain advantage or harm any one, then there was no lie. If it was a lie in the service of a good cause, then it was a white lie. If it was based on faulty information, then it was an honest mistake. If it was just there for emphasis, then it was an exaggeration. Lakoff (2004) p. 76.
Lie detection
The question of whether lies can reliably be detected through non-verbal means is a subject of particular controversy.
- Polygraph lie detector machines measure the physiological stress a subject endures in a number of measures while he or she gives statements or answers questions. Spikes in stress are said to indicate lying behavior. The accuracy of this method is widely disputed, and in several well-known cases it was proven to have been deceived. Nonetheless, it remains in use in many areas.
- Various truth drugs have been proposed and used anecdotally, though none is considered very reliable. The CIA attempted to find a universal "truth serum" in the MK-ULTRA project, but it was largely a fiasco.
- Facial microexpressions have been shown to reliably expose lying, according to Paul Ekman's Diogenes Project. Namely, a tiny flash of a "distress" facial expression, though difficult to see with the untrained eye, may give away when a person is lying.
More recently, neuroscientists have found that lying activates completely different brain structures during MRI scans, which may lead to a more accurate (if impractical) method of lie detection.
Representations of lie
- Carlo Collodi's Pinocchio is a wooden puppet often led into trouble by his propension to lie. His nose grows with every lie. A long nose has thus become a caricature of liars.
Covering up Lies
The well known phrase "Oh what a wicked web we weave when first we practice to deceive" describes the often difficult procedure of covering up a lie so that it is not detected at some future time and then that detection serve to bring disadvantage to the liar.
In "Human, All Too Human" philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche suggested that those who refrain from lying may do so only because of the difficulty involved in maintaining the lie. This is consistent with his general philosophy that divides or ranks people according to strength and ability. Thus some people tell the truth only out of weakness.
Evolution, Game Theory and the Lie
While most human societies have developed moral, ethical or religious codes prohibiting lying it would appear that other animals on this planet engage in lying quite regularly, and that the lie has been the result of and promoted by all the usual evolutionary forces. Specifically, predation often employs lying, as does avoidance of predation. A predator is lying if in the process of acquiring prey it conceals its location, uses camouflage capabilites of its skin and appendages, or dangles an appendage as a bait. A prey is lying if it uses camoflage to conceal itself or make it seem to be larger than it is or seem to be another species that is poisonous or distasteful to the predator.
Such capabilites to lie likely developed very gradually during evolution and likely began as very small changes in the appearance or behavior of some organisms. As the changes brought advantage to the organism it may therefore have increased in number due to that advantage, and due to continued pressure from a predator or scarcity of prey the advantage locked in and became a trait of that creature.
This incorporation of the lie into schemes of evolutionary advantage is a concept treated in the study of Game Theory of Evolution. Game Theory of Evolution assumes that creatures are often in resource conflict or in predator/prey realtionships with each other and develop strategies for advantage gain or loss reduction. These strategies may or may not be the result of some reasoning capabilites of the creature. In some cases the environment interacting with the way a creature has evolved so far creates the strategies for the creature without it needing any reasoning faculties. In other cases, there may be a combination of some reasoning and some environmentally formed lying abilities. The crocodile seems to know that if it drifts slowly, like a log, towards a wildebeast drinking at the edge of the river the wildebeast will not be alarmed and run away. The crocodile both resembles a log, having been shaped that way by evolutionary forces, and has some reasoning faculties.
Over eons this ability to lie became built into and a natural part of many species. Humans have used the word "cunning" to represent this ability in the non-human animal world, and then when the word "cunning" is applied to a human it is meant to connote sub-human behavior.
Sub-human behavior is of course just a value judgement. The case remains that lying is likely a natural, normal behavior for homo sapiens. People lie to attain advantage or to escape loss. This is no different than being a predator or a prey.
The invention or moralities concerns itself with group behavior. The general assumption is that if one wants to be a member of a group, and enjoy the benefits that group membership can convey, then one must refrain from using the lie technique, as to do so suggests one wishes to take special advantage for oneself, or avoid responsibilites, and therefore one does not truly want to belong to the group.
Thus to seek special advantage a member of a group can lie to a nation, a community, an employer, one's family, a friend, or a spouse. In every case one seeks to bring to oneself more than one's fair share of goods and services, at the expense of others, or to avoid one's fair share of responsibilities.
It is because the lie is natural and normal that large, organized societies must continually scavenge for it, if the society is not to be destroyed by rampant lying, rampant personal advantage seeking. Some consider this tendency to be as natural as defecating, and like feces it has to be removed or separated from populations for the overall health of the population.
This morally bland and objective view of lying helps to understand why people tend to categorize or rank lies with regards to "severity". All people recognize in themselves the ability and tendency to lie, and through practice have come to understand how some lies have little or no negative societal or group consequences. Furthermore, as societal rules have to be somewhat broad in scope and can't in every instance guarantee justice to the individual circumstance, individuals may lie in order to gain the justice denied them by overly broad and insensitive rules. Thus hundreds of millions of people alive at any given time may have lied simply in order to correct incidental bureaucratic or other systemic injustices. All humans have experience with the art of lying. A smallish group of humans make highly harmful lies.
Also from this perspective on lying we come to understand how group inclusion helps to prevent rogue lying behaviors. Exclusion from group membership due to physical appearances or abilities, or for other arbitrary reasons, will tend to produce more lying behavior and other violations of the social contract in the excluded, as they have no stake in the group.
Therefore the smooth functioning of large organized societies requires a sufficient degree of inclusion so that members do not become rogues and engage in destructive lying and other violations of the social contract.
Because rules against lying are moral rules, they also then become part of an aesthetic. So it can be said that a person who does not lie is more aesthetically pleasing. Most humans would agree with that statement. We often can't put our finger on why we prefer the company of truth tellers, but most do. The liar may not have harmed us in particular, but we find them offensive anyway. The human who lies therefore makes themself aesthetically displeasing to the group, as if he/she has a foul odor. Conversely, committed liars often think honest people foul.
References
- Adler, J. E., “Lying, deceiving, or falsely implicating”, Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 94 (1997), 435-452.
- Aquinas, T., St., “Question 110: Lying”, in Summa Theologiae (II.II), Vol. 41, Virtues of Justice in the Human Community (London, 1972).
- Augustine, St., "On Lying" and "Against Lying", in R. J. Deferrari, ed., Treatises on Various Subjects (New York, 1952).
- Bok, S., Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life, 2d ed. (New York, 1989).
- Chisholm, R. M., and T. D. Feehan, “The intent to deceive”, Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 74 (1977),143-159.
- Frankfurt, H. G., “The Faintest Passion”, in Necessity, Volition and Love (Cambridge, MA: CUP, 1999).
- Frankfurt, Harry, On Bullshit (Princeton University Press, 2005).
- Kant, I., Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, The Metaphysics of Morals and "On a supposed right to lie from philanthropy", in Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy, eds. Mary Gregor and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: CUP, 1986).
- Lakoff, George, Don't Think of an Elephant, (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2004).
- Mahon, J. E., “Kant on Lies, Candour and Reticence”, Kantian Review, Vol. 7 (2003), 101-133.
- Mannison, D. S., “Lying and Lies”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 47 (1969), 132-144.
- Siegler, F. A., “Lying”, American Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 3 (1966), 128-136.
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See also
- Big Lie
- The Boy Who Cried Wolf
- Bullshit
- Demagogy
- Gibberish
- Gobbledygook
- Nonsense
- Prisoner's dilemma
- Tall tale
- Taqiyya
- Truthfullness
- [[Truthiness]
External links
- What is Compulsive Lying?
- Stop Lying Free eBook?
- Using NLP and Body language to identify lies
- Some Philosophizing About Lying
- Lying in Islam
- Ayn Rand on the Noble Lie
- Science of Lying by Sean Henahan, Access Excellence, 4/20/99
- Lying in International Politics by John J. Mearsheimer, University of Chicago, August 22, 2004
Lie-to-children:
- The Science of Discworld
- h2g2
- an example from machall
- C2: All Models Are Wrong, Some Models Are Useful
- C2: Useful Lie
- C2: Wittgenstein's Ladder (Wittgenstein's Ladder, from Ludwig Wittgenstein)
- C2: Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by James W. Loewen. ISBN 0684818868cs:Lež
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