This post began as a comment on this post by Amos Wollen. I then realised that I had a lot to say on the matter, and thought it would all work much better as a standalone post rather than a comment that will be buried among the other comments on that post. It also made me write some stuff that I wanted to write anyway, eventually. So, what better time than the present?
This post was sparked by one article, but ultimately it’s meant as a standalone piece on the intersection of linguistics and philosophy.
I encourage you to read Amos’ post before reading this one, because a lot of what I say ends up being based around his examples, although I am trying to make a very general point that could apply essentially to many instances of philosophers trying to define stuff.
Sometimes I’m not sure what I think about philosophy. I mean, I am an amateur philosopher, in a sense, but I’m very amateur, and very rusty.
When I do think about philosophy, though, I often return to the realm of language. I am a linguist by training, and a linguist at heart, too. So this post is kind of a linguist’s take on philosophical thought surrounding deception. The whole thing is essentially one big question, but it takes a while to lay the grounding so that I can ask the question properly.
As with all my posts, I may be full of shit. (But not because someone made me eat it).
Introduction
What I’m trying to prove in this post is that there are two questions at play here with very different answers:
1. When do we (as, say, people of a certain intellect, or view on the world, or background in philosophy) use (speak, type, write, whatever) the word lying in the real world?
2. When would we be justified in terms of the truth content of our statement, or in the context of some philosophical enquiry, in saying that someone has lied, regardless of what social convention has to say on the matter?
What I’m then trying to prove is that question 1 is not a philosophical question, for the reason that the concept of lying is simply too fuzzy a concept for us to use in asking the question. In asking question 1, we can very easily end up in territory where we are trying to get an answer to some internal frustration or curiosity that I don’t think can reasonably be satisfied by asking the question in this way.
In other words, I’m saying that if a philosopher asks question 1, they may not be going about things in a sufficiently detailed and probing manner, and as a result may get bogged down and confused fairly quickly.
All this applies to philosophy more broadly, rather than the lying case in particular. It is a confusion, or frustration, or question that I often have when philosophers try to define something—or indeed, when anyone tries to define something.
A Conjecture on Vocabulary
When it comes to words, it’s survival of the fittest. Kind of by definition, really. If a word isn’t used very much, it doesn’t survive, which means that it’s not going to be used very much, at least in the near future.
In point 3, on whether one can tell a lie without having said something untrue, Amos writes:
Given the diversity of intuitions, and the fuzziness of most concepts, I’m inclined to say that this is just one of those cases where there’s no determinate answer to whether lies have to be false to count as lies.
I agree that ‘lying’ is a fuzzy concept. It might be useful to reflect: if ‘lying’ was easily-definable, would we necessarily have such a commonly-used almost-synonym as deceive?
Take concepts that have widely-accepted definitions. An apple, for example, is biologically a thing that comes from a certain type of tree. We don’t have synonyms that cover anything even close to apple. We have words like fruit (covering a much broader semantic terrain than apple) and words like Granny Smith* (covering a much narrower semantic terrain than apple). With a bit of Googling and thinking, I can’t come up with anything close to apple. There might be something somewhere, but it must be far less widely-used than apple.
*this is two words, but you get the point. 1) I don’t think the n-words vs one-word distinction matters for my argument, but also 2) there are plenty of one-word examples as in my next example.
To give that next example: the word water has a commonly-accepted definition. So the far-less-common ways of referring to water—like aqua and dihydrogen oxide—are largely pushed to one side. But words like saltwater are commonly used, because they’re needed. How else am I going to eloquently make distinctions between seawater and fresh water, for example? Salty water doesn’t cut it, and neither does waterwithahighsaltcontentsuchasseawater. Salt water is so commonly used that it has become one word instead of two.
It is at this point (or perhaps earlier) that your brain will be whirring, trying to think of counterexamples.
For example, don’t think and ponder both mean the same thing? Oh wait, no they don’t. Ponder has slightly different connotations to think, and is also unacceptable or at least somewhat strange in some cases where think is more typically used. ‘There’s some milk in the fridge, I ponder’, said nobody ever. The existence of ponder contributes to the richness of our language—think has many use cases, for one. For two, ponder also has different connotations in terms of register and formality. We have a reason to use ponder, sometimes, and so ponder lives on.
Okay, but what about big and large? Begin and start? End and finish?
Yeah, none of these are the same as their counterpart. Nobody says that their boyfriend’s car is large in a casual context, unless they’re trying to be funny. You can’t give said car a jump-begin. You’re not going to end with him, probably.
The point is that words have specific meanings and acceptable use-cases, and you can’t just take a word and try to define it if you’re also going to let yourself get caught in the sociolinguistic weeds of ‘wait, would I really say this in real life?’.
On Vaccines and Elbow Cancer
Amos’ point 4 is about whether agnostics can tell lies:
Suppose I’m agnostic about whether vaccines cause elbow cancer, but say, to impress a group of my right-wing friends, “Vaccines cause elbow cancer—hundreds die each year!”. Have I told a lie? Maybe. But not, I think, about vaccines. To have lied about vaccines, I’d need to have positively believed that vaccines are elbow-cancer safe. What you lied about, rather, was my belief on the topic of vaccines and elbow cancer.
In this case, even though we might not agree with the statement ‘Amos was lying’, we might still say ‘Amos was deceiving’ or ‘Amos was being deceitful’, so long as we explain how. Sentences like ‘Amos was lying that he believed that vaccines cause elbow cancer’ seem simply unlikely to be said, even though they may be true. I think they’re unlikely to be said because people simply aren’t used to using ‘lying’ to refer to the underlying implications of a statement about someone’s level of confidence: hypothetical Amos didn’t actually say anything like ‘I’ve witnessed hundreds die every year’ or ‘I have strong evidence that hundreds die every year’. He just said ‘Hundreds die every year’, and said nothing about the evidence. We’re simply not used to using the word lying to refer to the thing hypothetical Amos is doing here.
However, ‘What Amos said was a bit deceptive, because he doesn’t know that vaccines cause elbow cancer, and in fact he’s simply unsure on the matter’ seems more normal to me, somehow. Deceptive is a very useful adjective for cases where the word lying doesn’t quite seem to fit, or at least cases where the word lying is not expected. And generally, people don’t want to say things that are abnormal, for fear of embarrassment or being misunderstood. So it’s because of the necessity of concepts like deceiving and being deceitful in dealing with such edge cases that those words get to live on in our language. If lying were a good enough word for these cases, the definition of lying would be pretty clear, in my view. But that’s just not how the linguistic cookie crumbles.
Does this mean that question 2 above is not a good question to investigate? Not at all. But I’m not sure I trust some philosophers to be thinking about it in the way that I’d want them to. If philosophers want to investigate lying in such a way that the vaccine case counts as lying, then I’m all for it.
If they don’t think it counts as lying, then I become suspicious that they may be confusing linguistics and philosophy a little too much.
So, my question is: how do philosophers usually think about difficult-to-define-concepts? If they normally think in terms of that-doesn’t-count-as-lying-because-I’d-never-say-that-in-real-life, I tend to think that the question they’re asking simply doesn’t have a satisfying answer in pure philosophical terms. The question would have to be dealt with in a fairly cross-disciplinary way, as there are many relevant factors pertaining to linguistics and culture that move the discussion pretty far away from the realm of philosophy, I suspect. If they’re thinking of lying as being-deceitful-counts, my suspicions are lowered, because I think we can validly investigate this question philosophically without letting linguistics get in the way too much.
Fish
Suppose I catch a humungous fish, mistake it for a tiny fish, and accidently let it wriggle free into the water. I go home, plaster on a grin, and tell everyone the fish I caught was humungous. In this case, I’m intuitively disposed to say I’ve actually lied, not just attempted to lie. Others—like Carson—disagree: “My linguistic intuitions tell me that a lie must be a false statement, and that, therefore, what I say in this case is not a lie. I intend to lie in this case but I don’t.”
In the fish example, what the fisherman has done is simply misrepresented the facts. When we say a thing, we assert I know this to be true, when in reality we have a sort of Gettier Case, but applied to lying. The fisherman has said a true thing, and I don’t think many people in real life would call this lying, but rather an attempt to lie. He did, though, misrepresent his belief, in much the same way as hypothetical Amos lies about his belief that vaccines cause elbow cancer. The lack of a real difference between the fishing case and the vaccine case is actually my main point in all of this. Both constitute deception due to misrepresentation of belief.
I think Amos deals with this very well, and in the right kind of philosophical way, in the elbow cancer case (point 4). He correctly writes that there is a lie in there, about belief. The fisherman case (point 3) also constitutes a lie about belief. And so, when Amos concludes from point 3 that lying is too fuzzy a concept to define, huh, my eyebrows are somewhat raised, because this implies a kind of linguistic approach to the philosophical question. If philosophers try to answer such questions without leaving the realm of philosophy very much, I think they’re very likely to end up in trouble, and also likely to end up with conclusions that may belong in a linguistics or sociology paper, rather than a philosophy one.
My Take on The Fish
I think in the fish example, it could be useful to consider the reverse situation. Would we think someone was lying if they genuinely thought they had caught a big fish and boasted about this fact, only to find out later that it was in fact a small fish wearing a very convincing costume designed to make it look big?
I would say that we absolutely should not say this person was lying, presuming the costume was genuinely convincing, such that we can’t reasonably expect any suspicion could or should have arisen in the fisherman’s mind about the true size of the fish. I can see myself calling this lying in a humorous sense, perhaps. But in terms of what I think we’re trying to get at in investigating lying philosophically? No, this surely cannot be lying. We have other words for what this was. We might just call it a mistake, or confusion, or an unprecedented situation, or something. Lying just ain’t it, because it just ain’t lying.
So I think the key thing we’re trying to get at when investigating lying may be: should we blame this person for misrepresenting reality? In this case, perhaps we should talk in terms of blameworthy-reality-misrepresentation and think more about what that means, rather than lying. This seems like a more philosophically-grounded question that’s less likely to become confused by the need to incorporate insights from other domains.
My Question for Philosophers
Allow me to remind you of the two potential approaches to a definition of a word that I outlined earlier:
1. When would we (as, say, people of a certain intellect, or view on the world, or background in philosophy) use (speak, type, write, whatever) word X in the real world?
2. When would we be justified in terms of the truth content of our statement, or in the context of some philosophical enquiry, in using word X, regardless of what social convention has to say on the matter?
My question for philosophers is simply: do you take approach 1, or approach 2, or some other approach?