Towards a Typology of Untruthfulness

The discussion of lying a few weeks ago proved fruitful.  But lying is only one way to be untruthful.  A full understanding of lying is possible only by comparison with, and contrast to, other forms of untruthfulness or mendacity.  How many different forms are there?  This post takes a stab at cataloging the forms. Some are special cases of others.  The members of my elite commentariat will no doubt spot one or more of the following: incompleteness, redundancy, infelicity, ignorance of extant literature on the topic, and perhaps even utter wongheadedness, In which case I invite them to help me think better and deeper about this cluster of topics.

1. Lying proper.  A paradigm case of a lie is a false statement made by a person with the intention of deceiving his audience, in the case of a spoken  lie, or his readers in the case of a written lie.  This is essentially the dictionary definition.  I don't deny that there are reasonable objections one can make to it, some of which we have canvassed.  We will come back to lying, but first let's get some other related phenonena under our logical microscopes.

2. Fibs. These are lies about inconsequential matters.  Obama's recent brazen lies cannot therefore be correctly described as fibs. Every fib is a lie, but not every lie is a fib.  Suppose you are a very wealthy, very absent-minded, and a very generous fellow.  Suppose you loaned Tom $100 a few weeks ago but then couldn't remember whether it was $100 you loaned or $10.  Tom gives $10 to Phil to give to you.  Tom states to Phil, falsely, that $10 is what he (Tom) owes you.  Tom's lie to Phil is a fib because rooking you out of $90 is an inconsequential  matter, moneybags that you are.

3. White lies.  A white lie  might be defined as a false statement made with the intention to deceive, but without the intention to harm.  A white lie would then be an innocuously deceptive false statement.  Suppose I know Jane to be 70 years old, but she does not know that I know this.  She asks me how old I think she is.  I say , "60."  I have made statement that I know to be false with the intention to deceive, but far from harming the addressee, I have made her feel good.

On this analysis, white lies are a species of lies, as are 'black' or malicious lies, and 'white' is a specifying adjective.  But suppose you believe, not implausibly, that lying is analytically wrong, i.e.,  that moral wrongness is included in the  concept of lying in the way moral wrongness is included in the concept of murder.    If you believe this, then a white lie is not a lie, and 'white' is an alienans adjective.  For then lying is necessarily wrong and white lies are impossible. 

If a white lie is not a lie, it is still a form of untruthfulness.

3. Subornation of lying.  It is one thing to lie, quite another to persuade another to lie. One can persuade another to lie without lying oneself.  But if one does this one adds to the untruthfulness in the world.  So subornation of lying is a type of untruthfulness.

4. Slander.  I should think that every slanderous statement, whether oral or written, is a lie, but not conversely.  So slandering is a species of lying.  To slander a person is to make one or more  false statements about the person with (i) the intention of deceiving the audience, and (ii) the intention of damaging the person's reputation or credibility.

One can lie about nonpersons.  Obama's recent brazen lies are about the content of the so-called Affordable Care Act.  But it seems that it is built into the concept of slander that if a person slanders x, then x is a person.  But this is not perfectly obvious.  Liberals slander conservatives when they call us racists, but do they slander our country when that call it institutionally racist? 

Monokroussos and Lupu argued that  a statement needn't be false to be a lie; it suffices for a statement to be a lie that it be believed by its maker to be false (and made with the intention to deceive).  Well, what should we say about damaging statements that are true? 

Suppose I find out that a neighbor is a registered sex offender.  If  I pass on this information with the intention of damaging the reputation of my neighbor, I have not slandered him.  I have spoken the truth.  In Catholic moral theology this is called detraction.  The distinction between slander or calumny and detraction is an important one, but we needn't go further into this because detraction, though it is a form of maliciousness, is not a form of untruthfulness. 

5.  Malicious gossip.  This may be distinct from both slander and detraction.  Slander is false and damaging while detraction is true and damaging.  Malicious gossip is the repetition of statements damaging to a person's reputation when the person who repeats them does not know or have good reason to believe that they are either true or false.

There is also a distinction among (i) originating a damaging statement, (ii) repeating a damaging statement, and (iii) originating  a damaging statement while pretending to be merely repeating it.

6. Insincere promises.  An insincere or false promise is one made by a person who has no intention of keeping it.  As I have already argued in detail, promises, insincere or not, are not lies.  Obama made no false promises; he lied about the extant content of the Obamacare legislation.  But insincere promising is a form of untruthfulness insofar as it involves deceiving the addressee of the promise as to one's intentions with respect to one's future actions.

7.  Bullshitting.  Professor Frankfurt has expatiated rather fully on this topic.   The bullshitter is one who 'doesn't give a shit' about the truth value of what he is saying.  He doesn't care how things stand with reality. The liar, by contrast, must care: he must know (or at least attempt to know) how things are if he is to have any chance of deceiving his audience.  Think of it this way: the bullshitter doesn't care whether he gets things right or gets them wrong; the liar cares to get them right so he can deceive you about them.  More here.

8.  Mixing untruths with truths.  This is the sort of untruthfulness that results from failing to tell nothing but the truth.

9. Evasion.  Refusing to answer questions because one doesn not want the whole truth known.  Evasion is a form of untruthfulness that does not involve the making of false statements, but rather the failing to make true statements.

10. Linguistic hijacking and verbal obfuscation.  A specialty of liberals.  For example, the coining of question-begging epithets such as 'homophobia' and 'Islamophobia.' Orwellianisms:  bigger government is smaller government; welfare dependency is self-reliance.  More examples in Language Matters category.

11. Hypocrisy.  Roughly, the duplicity of saying one thing and doing another.  See Hypocrisy category for details.

12. Insincerity, bad faith, self-deception, phoniness, dissimulation.  See Kant's Paean to Sincerity.

13. Exaggeration.  Suppose I want to emphasize the primacy of practice over doctrine in religion.  I say, "Religion is practice, not doctrine."  What I say is false, and in certain  sense irresponsible, but not a lie.  Here are posts on exaggeration.

14. Understatement.  "Thousands of Jews were gassed at Auschwitz."  This is not false, but by understating the number murdered by the Nazis it aids and abets untruthfulness.

15. Perjury.  Lying under oath in a court of law.

16. Subornation of perjury. 

17. Intellectual dishonesty.

18. Disloyalty.

 (in progress)

Related articles

On Misusing the Word 'Lie'

Promises and Lies

Obama as Bullshitter

For a Lie to be a Lie, Must There be an Intention to Deceive?

The Dictionary Definition of Lying Again: Hanson's Counterexample

Truth and Truthfulness

Why Would Obama Say He is not Ideological?

Comments

[Erol Copelj]

Hi Bill,

Do you understand ‘insincere’ in ‘insincere promise’ as an alienating adjective? That is my view; a promise implies the presence of an obligation, which endures after the promise itself lapses. An insincere promise is a lie: the speaker makes a false statement representing the presence of a promise, and thereby of the obligation, while knowing that no promising occurred, and that no obligation is present.

Erol

[BV]

Thank you for the comment, Erol.

You raise an interesting issue that I raised in an earlier post but without taking a position on it. We need to distinguish two questions. The first is whether an insincere promise is a promise. If no, then a second question arises: Is an insincere promise a lie? One could maintain that an insincere promise is not a promise, but also that it is not a lie.

You are on fairly solid ground with respect to the first question. One could argue like this:

If S promises to do A, then S intends to do A; but if S insincerely promises to do A, then S does not intend to do A; ergo, insincere promises are not promises.

John Searle (Speech Acts, p. 62)suggests that 'S intends to do A' be replaced by 'S intends that the utterance of T will make him responsible for intending to do A.' This replacement allows for insincere promises to count as genuine promises.

But let's assume that an insincere promise is not a promise. I don't think it is therefore a lie. Suppose I insincerely promise Jack to come to his New Year's Eve party and bring pizza. I do this by uttering the sentence, "I wouldn't miss your party for anything, Jack, and you can count on me to supply the pizza, pepperoni and mushroom is what you prefer, right?"

My utterance is not a false statement because it is not a statement. Therefore my utterance is not a lie. Here is an example of a false statement: "The sentence I just uttered expresses my sincere intention to bring pizza to your party."

[pa]

Divison of Labour recently had a post that discussed Obama's lies about Obamacare, including what might be called "why lying liars lie." I have compiled a list of 7 reasons politicians lie from his post. Your list characterizes the lies, but his post characterizes the liar. I think this makes an interesting companion piece for your post, and it might inspire another entry or two for your list.

http://divisionoflabour.com/archives/2013_11.php#008338

1. Blunder or error (not a lie), an incorrect reading of facts
2. To protect national security
3. Desperate self-preservation
4. Puffery, optimistic projections
5. A disputed point
6. A tendentious or unusual characterization of a plan (such as FDR describing social security as an insurance plan)
7. A deliberate and intentional lie to the public in order to pass a law that could not otherwise be passed

[Erol Copelj]

Is an insincere promise a lie?

Promises are expressible via non-declarative statement. Granted. The question is: does lying imply that the liar utter the false statement or is it sufficient that the liar motivates the hearer to frame a false statement? If the former, then I agree that an insincere promise does not qualify as a lie. However, I think that lying is instantiated in the latter scenario also. For example, in saying "I wouldn't miss your party for anything, Jack, and you can count on me to supply the pizza, pepperoni and mushroom is what you prefer, right?" Bill anticipates the formation of a false statement in Jack’s mind, e.g. “Bill promises to do X, Y and Z”. And Bill knows that this is a false statement. After all, the utterance of a false statement in a unproblematic case of lying serves as a means towards the same end: of motivating the hearer to frame a thought with the same content. And it is the realisation of this end that is constitutive of lying. In the just described scenario, the same end was reached via different means.

[Noland Brown]

I found these distinctions from Aquinas, http://www.newadvent.org/summa/3110.htm#article2 , to be helpful. He considers lying in two ways(three really, but one is theological); in regards to the nature of a lie and in regards to the intention of the liar. In regards to to a lie's nature, he divides it into two classes; exaggeration or going beyond the truth, and falling short of the truth in some way(much like your 13 and 14, but in regards to lying rather than simply untruth). He also thinks one can suitably divide the intentions in a lie into three; officious, jocose, and malicious lies, or lies which help, please, or harm. Jocose lies are an interesting case, since one does not necessarily intend to deceive when one "lies" in a joke. Aquinas seems to think they are still lies because they are, "from the genus of the action, of a nature to deceive". This seems a bit unclear but it isn't entirely implausible. If I make a joke which contains an untrue boast or some such, it is possible that such a statement may deceive, even though that is not my intention. You covered something like this in a previous post, but perhaps Aquinas is offering a different way of thinking through that problem. Namely, what distinguishes a lie primarily is not an intention but the nature of the utterance regarding its potential to deceive(or something like that).

This made me wonder, given the split between the nature of the act, and the intention and beliefs of the speaking agent, how would one classify something like an untruth told by an ignorant agent for the benefit of some individual or political community? I'm thinking here of Plato's Noble Lie, or other founding myths. Are they lies in any sense? I was tempted to classify it with what you termed bullshit; but even if such a case isn't a lie it seems unfair to put it there. Can one perhaps not care about the truth of an utterance in either a malicious or in a harmless way? Sorry if the comment isn't helpful(still a student!). Love the blog!

[BV]

Noland,

Thank you for your meaty comments. Much to chew on. The Noble Lie is a topic I need to address. Do you have some Platonic passages/references for me?

Thanks for reading!

[Noland Brown]

I do not have my copy of the Republic at hand, although I believe Socrates first mentions it at the end of book 3 of the Republic. Looking at book 3 using this : http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1497/1497-h/1497-h.htm#link2H_4_0006 I see that Socrates also states that, "Again, truth should be highly valued; if, as we were saying, a lie is useless to the gods, and useful only as a medicine to men" The noble lie is then intended as a kind of medicine, an untruth to protect his imaginary society. But there is certainly something true about his myth, or he would not be able to put it forward as something capable of deceiving even the rulers, whom Socrates believes, per book 3, are the only ones who should be allowed to(medicinally) lie. I am tempted to think that Plato introduces the "noble lie" as a kind of reductio of the praxis of lying. If one allows the rulers to lie to maintain the public good, then even the rulers are deceived. But for Socrates, then, it seems a lie, his intention is to deceive, he has no reason to believe the myth he constructs has truth in the way he wants it to be received( i.e. not allegorically), and so on. But the case becomes incredibly more complicated if say, such a state existed, and the rulers believed the lie. What does the expression of the lie become for them then? Certainly not a lie. But what?