Maverick Philosopher

How to Tell the Truth without being Truthful

Multiple are the modes of mendacity.  Obama, Biden, Hillary and their ilk are masters of these modes. May a pox, but no pax, be upon them. Over at Substack, a quick look at one of the modes.

Notes on Kierkegaard and Truth

From a December, 1985 journal entry.

........................

Why does Søren Kierkegaard maintain that truth is subjectivity, and in the Danish equivalents of those very words? What could he mean by such a strange assertion?

To rehearse the obvious: S. K. does not mean that truth is subjective or relative, varying with persons, places, times, perspectives, or any other index. The Dane presupposes that truth is objective. But then what could the central claim of Concluding Unscientific Postscript, "truth is subjectivity," mean?

Since Kierkegaard assumes the objective truth of Christianity, and does so without question or caveat, the only issue for him is the subjective appropriation of Christian truth. To appropriate is to make one's own, and the one in question is not the abstract one in general, but in every case the concrete existing individual. S. K.'s greatness is his honesty in expounding the demands that genuine Christianity makes on the would-be Christian and in exposing the state-sponsored Christianity Inc. of his day. Given the tacit presupposition of Christianity's truth, it makes sense for S. K. to say that truth is subjectivity. For it is not the objective truth of Christianity that is an issue for him, but the individual, and thus necessarily subjective, task of becoming a Christian. That is my charitable reading of the famous dictum.

But to be precise in our use of terms, truth is by its very nature objective, not subjective; what is subjective is truthfulness. Only a person can correctly be said to be truthful in the primary sense of the term. It would make no sense to describe propositions as truthful any more than it would make sense to say that persons have truth-values or stand in entailment relations or correspond to reality.

Objective truth and subjective truthfulness, though distinct,  are related. (It is worth noting that 'objective and 'subjective' in the immediately preceding sentence are redundant qualifiers: truth would not be what it is if it were not objective, and truthfulness would not be what it is if if were not a personal attribute.) They are related in that one can be truthful only by respecting the truth, by living in accordance with it, by refraining from lying, deceit, and deception, by telling the truth.

Subjective, lived, existential truth is entirely vacuous if disengaged from objective truth; at the limit subjective truth thus disengaged is indistinguishable from vicious self-will. It then becomes what in contemporary parlance is called 'my truth.' But there is no such thing as my truth; truth by its very nature is objective. What is mine can only be my appropriation or non-appropriation of the truth, truth that cannot be mine. One cannot appropriate and live the truth unless there is truth to be appropriated.

I said that truth and truthfulness are related. But I don't want to give the impression that while truthfulness requires truth, truth can subsist without truthfulness. That may be, but it is not obvious and may be reasonably controverted. So I now take a further step by stating that truth and truthfulness are mutually implicative. They are, if you will,  'dialectically related:' no one without the other, and no other without the one. It is clear that truthfulness implies truth; less clear, but arguable is that truth implies truthfulness. That is to say: there cannot be objective truth without subjectivity, without a truthful subject.  Can I prove it? No. But I can make a case for it, a case that renders the thesis reasonable to believe.

Truth is made for the mind at least in this sense: Objective truth is necessarily such that is it possibly recognized by someone. Truth mediates between mind and reality.  Truth is the truth of reality in both the objective and subjective senses of the genitive. Truth is about reality, but it is also reality's truth. Reality's truth is reality's intelligibility, its aptness to be understood. So if it is objectively true that Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun, then that truth, that true proposition, is necessarily such that it is possibly recognized or known by someone.  But it cannot be possibly known unless there actually exists someone who can know it. Now what is really possible must be grounded in the abilities and powers of actual agents. But there are many truths that are not possibly known by any finite agent. And yet they too are possibly known because knowability is an essential property of every truth. Therefore, their knowability is grounded in the actual power to know of an actual being. "And this all men call God."

Now that was rather quick, wasn't it? But I meant it merely as a sketch for an argument to be laid out rigorously. (The modal moves I made invite close scrutiny.) So laid out, the argument still won't be rationally compelling, but then no substantive argument in philosophy or theology for that matter is rationally compelling.  But many such arguments do supply grounds for reasoned belief which all that is available to us here below.

So suppose God exists. He is the truthful subjective source of all objective truth. In God, truthfulness and truth are one, the subjective and the objective coalesce. The mutually implicative relation of truthfulness and truth is as tightly grounded as could be. This is exactly what we should expect give the divine simplicity for which there many arguments. 

To sum up. Truthfulness for us here below is a matter of the subjective appropriation of objective truth. Read in this sense, S. K. 's dictum is defensible. It is not truth that is subjective, but truthfulness. 

There is no truthfulness without truth. This is well-nigh evident if not self-evident. That there is no truth without truthfulness is less clear but arguable as above.

Naomi Wolf on Tucker Carlson's J6 Revelations

A rich Substack article that ends thusly:

The gatekeepers who lie to the public about the most consequential events of our time — and who thus damage our nation, distort our history, and deprive half of our citizenry of their right to speak, champion and choose, without being tarred as would-be violent traitors - deserve our disgust.

I am sorry the nation was damaged by so much untruth issued by those with whom I identified at the time.

I am sorry my former “tribe” is angry at a journalist for engaging in — journalism.

I am sorry I believed so much nonsense.

Though it is no doubt too little, too late —

Conservatives, Republicans, MAGA:

I am so sorry.

Bullshitting and Lying

Top o' the Stack.

Tulsi Gabbard Exposes George Santos

Would that Tulsi would and could lay  bare the brazen bullshit of every single swamp critter in the District of Columbia from the life-long liar Joey B. on down and not leaving out Alejandro Mayorkas, 'Director of Homeland Security' -- how is that for an Orwellian title! -- and Elizabeth 'Fauxcahontas' Warren, and do it with the style, grace, and integrity she demonstrates in this amazing video. 

Please watch it and propagate it. 

Truth and Decision

One cannot decide what the truth is. But one can and must decide what one will accept and live by as the truth.

Yes, I Repeat Myself

Leftists constantly repeat their brazen lies in the hope that eventually they will be taken for truths. So we of the Coalition of the Sane and the Reasonable need constantly to repeat truths. Not our truths, for there is no such thing as 'our' truth or 'my' truth or 'your' truth.' Truth is not subject to ownership. If you have it, you have it without possessing it.

 

So speak the truth and speak it often. Don't be afraid of repeating yourself. Living well is impossible without repetition. All learning, all teaching, all physical culture, all musicianship require repetition. No mastery of anything, no improvement in anything, is possible without repetition. Can you play that riff the same way every time? If not, keep practicing. 

 

By practicing blows, whether verbal or physical, you learn how to land effective ones.

Truth and Power

'Speaking truth to power' is a phrase leftists love when they are out of power; in power, they exercise it, and truth be damned. They imbibed mendacity with their mothers' milk.

A Foolish Notion

Foolish  is the notion that the truth must not be spoken if it could possibly be used to harm someone or hurt his feelings.

Spiritual Mountebanks

The world is full of hustlers and charlatans who prey upon spiritual seekers. One ought to be suspicious of anyone who claims enlightenment or special powers. The acid test, perhaps, is whether they demand money or sex for their services. If they do, run away while holding onto your wallet. 'Bhagwan Shree' Rajneesh  is a good example from the '80s. 

Recoiling from the mountebanks, some go to the opposite extreme, holding as fraudulent all spiritual teachers.

Some people are gullible and credulous, without a skeptical bone in their bodies. Others are skepticism incarnate, unable to believe anything or admire anything. A strange case of the latter is U. G. Krishnamurti, the anti-guru and 'anti-charlatan.' Please don't confuse him with the much better known J. Krishnamurti.

An obsessive doubter and debunker, U. G. Krishnamurti is a bit like the atheist who can't leave God alone, but must constantly be disproving him. U.G. can't leave the enlightenment quest and 'spirituality' alone. It's all buncombe, he thinks, but he can't be done with it.

Buddha, Jesus, and the rest were all just kidding themselves and misleading others. But U. G. can't just arrive at this conclusion and move on to something he deems worthwhile. For he is an 'anti-quester' tied to what he opposes by his self-defining opposition to it. Curiously perverse, but fascinating. He is a little like the later Wittgenstein who, though convinced that the problems of philosophy arose from linguistic bewitchment, couldn't move on to something worth doing, but instead obsessively scribbled on in any attempt to show a nonexistent fly the way out of a nonexistent fly-bottle.

U. G. can't seem to take seriously any experience. Each is just an experience. None is revelatory or finally veridical. Religious and mystical experiences are no different than sexual or drug experiences. Before any experience can put him in contact with any reality, his skepticism dissolves it.

"Just an experience! What do I need more experiences for!"

Related: 

Thomas Merton on Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

The gullible Merton appears to have been taken in by Trungpa.

Lie or Exaggeration or Bullshit? Politics in an Age of Bullshit

A redacted re-post from 30 November 2016

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Over the weekend, Donald Trump bragged in signature style that he “won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” Lefties are calling the statement a lie.  But it is no such thing.  In the typical case, a lie is a false statement made with the intention to deceive.  In the typical case, one who lies knows the truth, but misrepresents it to his audience out of a desire to deceive them.  But no one knows the truth-value of Trump's braggadocious conditional.  It could be true, but neither Trump nor anyone else has any evidence of its truth.  Although verifiable in principle, it is not practically verifiable.

When lefties call a statement a lie which is not a lie should we say that they are lying about what it is?

Was Trump exaggerating when he made his remark?  That's not right either.

I think what we have here is a species of bullshit in the sense pinned down by a noted philosopher.  According to Harry Frankfurt, a  statement is bullshit if it is

. . . grounded neither in a belief that it is true nor, as a lie must be, in a belief that it is not true. It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth — this indifference to how things really are — that I regard as of the essence of bullshit." (emphasis added)

Professor Frankfurt has a fine nose for the essence of bullshit.  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.

Now if the bullshitter does not care about truth, what does he care about? He cares about himself, about making a certain impression. His aim is to (mis)represent himself as knowing what he does not know or more than he actually knows. Frankfurt again:

. . . bullshitting involves a kind of bluff. It is closer to bluffing, surely than to telling a lie. But what is implied concerning its nature by the fact that it is more like the former than it is like the latter? Just what is the relevant difference here between a bluff and a lie? Lying and bluffing are both modes of misrepresentation or deception. Now the concept most central to the distinctive nature of a lie is that of falsity: the liar is essentially someone who deliberately promulgates a falsehood. Bluffing too is typically devoted to conveying something false. Unlike plain lying, however, it is more especially a matter not of falsity but of fakery. This is what accounts for its nearness to bullshit. For the essence of bullshit is not that it is false but that it is phony. In order to appreciate this distinction, one must recognize that a fake or a phony need not be in any respect (apart from authenticity itself) inferior to the real thing. What is not genuine need not also be defective in some other way. It may be, after all, an exact copy. What is wrong with a counterfeit is not what it is like, but how it was made. This points to a similar and fundamental aspect of the essential nature of bullshit: although it is produced without concern with the truth, it need not be false. The bullshitter is faking things. But this does not mean that he necessarily gets them wrong. (emphasis added)

When did the Age of Bullshit begin in American politics?  Perhaps with the inauguration of Bill Clinton.  But it really gets underway with Barack Obama.  Obama is the shuck-and-jive precursor of Trump.  So let's recall some of his antics.

As Frankfurt points out, the essence of bullshit is a lack of concern for truth.  But truth and consistency are closely related notions.  Two statements are consistent (inconsistent) just in case they can (cannot) both be true.  Now I do not know if there are any cases of Obama contradicting himself synchronically (at a time), but there are plenty of examples of him contradicting himself diachronically.  He said things as a senator the opposite of which he says now.  Victor Davis Hanson supplies numerous examples in Obama as Chaos:

. . . when the president takes up a line of argument against his opponents, it cannot really be taken seriously — not just because it is usually not factual, but also because it always contradicts positions that Obama himself has taken earlier or things he has previously asserted. Whom to believe — Obama 1.0, Obama 2.0, or Obama 3.0?

When the president derides the idea of shutting down the government over the debt ceiling, we almost automatically assume that he himself tried to do just that when as a senator he voted against the Bush administration request in 2006, when the debt was about $6 trillion less than it is now.

The problem here is not merely logical; it is also ethical: the man is not truthful.  Truth, falsity, consistency, inconsistency pertain to propositions, not persons.  Truthfulness, deceitfulness, lack of concern for truth and consistency -- these are ethical attributes, properties of persons.  Obama the bullshitter is an ethically defective president.  When Nixon lied, he could be shamed by calling him on it.  That is because he was brought up properly, to value truth and truthfulness.  But the POMO Obama, like that "first black president" Bill Clinton, apparently can't be shamed.  It's all bullshit and fakery and shuckin' and jivin'.  There is no gravitas in these two 'black' presidents, the one wholly white, the other half-white.  Everything's a 'narrative' -- good POMO word, that -- and the only question is whether the narrative works in the moment for political advantage. A narrative needn't be true to be a narrative, which is why the POMO types like it.  Hanson has Obama's number:

But a third explanation is more likely. Obama simply couldn’t care less about what he says at any given moment, whether it is weighing in on the football name “Redskins” or the Travyon Martin trial. He is detached and unconcerned about the history of an issue, about which he is usually poorly informed. Raising the debt ceiling is an abstraction; all that matters is that when he is president it is a good thing and when he is opposing a president it is a bad one. Let aides sort out the chaos. Obamacare will lower premiums, not affect existing medical plans, and not require increased taxes; that all of the above are untrue matters nothing. Who could sort out the chaos?

[. . .]

The media, of course, accepts that what Obama says on any given day will contradict what he has said or done earlier, or will be an exaggeration or caricature of his opponents’ position, or simply be detached from reality. But in their daily calculus, that resulting chaos is minor in comparison to the symbolic meaning of Obama. He is, after all, both the nation’s first African-American president and our first left-wing progressive since Franklin Roosevelt.

In comparison with those two facts, no others really matter.

The Infirmity of Truth

Having the truth is no defense in the court of the politically correct. For that court lies in the precincts of power, and here below truth is no match for power unless those who are truthful also have power.  But the paths to power are often paved with lies and their necessity. Rare then is the truthful one who attains power with his truthfulness intact.  

'Knowingly Lied'

'Knowingly lied' is a pleonastic expression. One cannot lie without intending to deceive. And one cannot intend to do X without knowing that one intends to do X. So one cannot lie without lying knowingly: there is no such thing as an unknowing or unwitting lie. It follows that 'knowingly lied' is a pleonastic or redundant expression.  Good writers avoid pleonasm.

Good writers also know when to break rules in the service of what they want to say.

LIes and Counterfactuals

Suppose I say

1) Had Jeb Bush won the 2016 Republican  nomination, Hillary Clinton would have won the presidential election.

Suppose a Never-Trumper calls me a liar.  Have I lied?  A lie is an intentional misrepresentation of a truth known by the one who lies in order to deceive the person or persons being lied to.  Now (1) is either true or not true, but no one knows which it is. So no one can rightly call me a liar for asserting (1).  

If I am not lying when I assert (1), what am I doing?  I am offering a reasonable, but practically unverifiable, speculation.  And the same goes for a person who denies (2).

Donald Trump famously boasted, 

2) Had it not been for all the illegal votes, I would have won the popular vote as well as the electoral college vote.

Leftists, who compile long lists of Trump's supposed lies, had among their number some who counted (2) -- an accurate paraphrase of what Trump said, not an exact quotation -- as a lie.

But it is obviously not a lie. The worst you could call it is an unlikely self-serving speculation.  He did not assert something he knew to be false, he asserted something he did not know to be true.

Trump haters who compile lists of his 'lies,' need to give a little thought as to what a lie is; else their count will be wrong. 

Spiritual Mountebanks

The world is full of hustlers and charlatans who prey upon spiritual seekers. One ought to be suspicious of anyone who claims enlightenment or special powers. The acid test, perhaps, is whether they demand money or sex for their services. If they do, run away while holding onto your wallet. 'Bhagwan Shree' Rajneesh , now the subject of a Netflix documentary series, is a good example from the '80s. 

Recoiling from the mountebanks, some go to the opposite extreme, holding as fraudulent all spiritual teachers.

Some people are gullible and credulous, without a skeptical bone in their bodies. Others are skepticism incarnate, unable to believe anything or admire anything. A strange case of the latter is U. G. Krishnamurti, the anti-guru and 'anti-charlatan.' Please don't confuse him with the much better known J. Krishnamurti.

An obsessive doubter and debunker, U. G. Krishnamurti is a bit like the atheist who can't leave God alone, but must constantly be disproving him. U.G. can't leave the enlightenment quest and 'spirituality' alone. It's all buncombe, he thinks, but he can't be done with it.

Buddha, Jesus, and the rest were all just kidding themselves and misleading others. But U. G. can't just arrive at this conclusion and move on to something he deems worthwhile. For he is an 'anti-quester' tied to what he opposes by his self-defining opposition to it. Curiously perverse, but fascinating. He is a little like the later Wittgenstein who, though convinced that the problems of philosophy arose from linguistic bewitchment, couldn't move on to something worth doing, but instead obsessively scribbled on in any attempt to show a nonexistent fly the way out of a nonexistent fly-bottle.

U. G. can't seem to take seriously any experience. Each is just an experience. None is revelatory or finally veridical. Religious and mystical experiences are no different than sexual or drug experiences. Before any experience can put him in contact with any reality, his skepticism dissolves it.

"Just an experience! What do I need more experiences for!"

Related: 

Thomas Merton on Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

The gullible Merton appears to have been taken in by Trungpa.

Why Lie?

Why lie when the facts are easily established and indeed well known? Hillary is famous for this, but Elizabeth Warren, the 'Cherokee' Pinocchio, takes the cake. See also Elizabeth Warren Went Native.

Related: Hillary the Fabulist. It begins:

It has been said of Bill Clinton that he'd rather climb a tree and tell a lie than stand on the ground and tell the truth.  Hillary continues the family tradition.  One of her latest untruths is that all four of her grandparents came to the U.S. as immigrants when only one of them did.  She lied, brazenly, about something easily checked. To prolong the arboreal metaphor, why would she perch herself far out on a limb so easily sawn off?  Beats me. 

 

Anti-Natalism and the Search for Truth

C. L. writes and I respond in blue:

You never seem to allow comments on the posts I want to comment on, so I'm forced to add another email to  your overwhelming pile.

BV: Well, my pile is not that bad. This is one of the many benefits of relative obscurity. And I am happy to receive your response.

Because I generally agree with you so much, I don't write too often. I don't even write where I moderately disagree with you. And I try not to write even where we sit on opposite ends of the table, because you are a trained philosopher and I am a dilettante.

For example, I tried to let this anti-natalism stuff pass by, but you posted again on it today with your typical caveat that you are out to seek truth wherever it may be found. I suppose I find that a bit cavalier when you are dealing with far-out ideas like anti-natalism because it seems so intuitively implausible, and not just to myself.

I think that though we both seek truth (and I am making an educated guess here so you'll forgive me the offence if I'm wrong), the reason I don't take anti-natalism seriously is because I am a Christian first and philosopher second, and you do because you are a philosopher first and a Christian (theist) second, which would explain your mantra about seeking truth wherever it is found as justification for taking this idea seriously. 

BV: I will first point out that there is a anti-natalist strain in Christianity.  See, for example, More on Christian Anti-Natalism and the accompanying comment thread. So it is not clear that Christianity rules out anti-natalism in such a way as to make it impossible for any Christian to take it seriously.  The logically prior question, of course, is: What is Christianity? Decide that question and then you will be in a  position to decide whether Christianity is anti-natalist.

I will also point out that if you set store by plausibility and reject without examination the implausible, then you ought to reject orthodox (miniscule 'o') Christianity since its central doctrine is an apparent (and many would say real) absurdity or logical contradiction.  And so is the doctrine of the Trinity which Chalcedonian incarnationalism requires. See, for example, the work of the Christian philosopher, Dale Tuggy. Both of these constitutive doctrines are apparently absurd for reasons I examine in detail in the Trinity and Incarnation category. However we analyze 'implausible,' it is clear that what is apparently absurd is implausible.  So if you reject without examination the implausible, then you should reject without examination Christianity. And if you don't do the latter, then you shouldn't reject anti-natalism without examination.

And then there is the fact that you simply reject Benatar's views without examining his arguments. That's what ideologues do, not philosophers. The arguments raise important questions as should be obvious from my ongoing series. So one can learn from his work even f in the end one doesn't accept his arguments.

A tougher and deeper fourth issue concerns how philosophy and a revelation-based religion such as Christianity are related. There is a tension here and it is the tension between Athens (Greek philosophy) and Jerusalem (the Bible), the two main roots of the West whose fruitful entanglement is the source of the West's vitality.    As Leo Strauss sees it, it is a struggle over the unum necessarium, the one thing needful or necessary:

To put it very simply and therefore somewhat crudely, the one thing needful according to Greek philosophy is the life of autonomous understanding.  The one thing needful as spoken by the Bible is the life of obedient love.  The harmonizations and synthesizations are possible because Greek philosophy can use obedient love in a subservient function, and the Bible can use philosophy as a handmaid; but what is so used in each case rebels against such use, and therefore the conflict is really a radical one. ("Progress or Return?" in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, University of Chicago Press, 1989, p. 246, bolding added.)

Even a  philosopher who is open to the claims of Revelation will feel duty-bound qua philosopher by his intellectual conscience to examine the epistemic credentials of Biblical revelation lest he unjustifiably accept what he has no right to accept.  This attitude is personified by Edmund Husserl.  On his death bed, cared for by Catholic nuns, open to the Catholic faith which some of his star pupils had embraced,  he was yet unable to make the leap, remarking that it was too late for him, that he would need for each dogma five years of investigation!  That attitude is typical of a real philosopher.   If you can't 'relate to it' then you don't understand the demands of the philosophical vocation.  The philosopher is called to a certain sort of life, the life of autonomous understanding, as Strauss so well puts it.

It is a tough problem and the conflict is really radical as Strauss says. The sense of intellectual honesty and intellectual responsibility in a great philosopher like Husserl is burningly strong. Someone who shares this sense cannot easily accept without careful scrutiny some religion that he happens to have been brought up on. On the other hand, where does philosophy get us? Husserl bent every fiber of his being to establishing philosophy as strict science, strenge Wissenschaft, but he failed to persuade even his best and closest students. I am thinking of Edith Stein who, while recognizing Husserl as her 'master,' in the end turned to Thomas and became a Carmelite nun. And then there is Roman Ingarden, an outstanding but neglected thinker who rejected Husserl's transcendental idealism.  Heidegger, the most influential of Husserl's students, was also soon on his own exploring strange and dark Black Forest paths and wood trails. (The allusion is to his Holzwege.)

You have also said elsewhere that there is nary an argument (that is not either self-evident or tautological) that is uncontested by philosophers. 

BV: Right. That's the trouble with philosophy. None of its conclusions are conclusive. Nothing gets settled to the satisfaction of all competent practitioners.  Dogmatists confidently assert substantive theses, but it is mostly if not always bluster. The problems of philosophy are genuine, and many of them are humanly important; but none of them has ever been solved in a way that makes it clear that it has been solved.  The strife of systems continues unabated. But that is hardly a reason simply to plump for some ideology.

The only purpose of seeking truth is to find it (and probably to let others know about it once you have). But if you sought and you have found it (or are convinced you have found it), then what good is it to entertain truths that run contrary to it (or are precluded by it)? This just seems like regress, not progress. It's like considering infanticide when you already reject abortion. 

BV: True, we seek in order to find. And it is true that some convince themselves, or become convinced, that they have found the truth.  Such a one was Edith Stein:

In the summer of 1921, she spent several weeks in Bergzabern (in the Palatinate) on the country estate of Hedwig Conrad-Martius, another pupil of Husserl's. Hedwig had converted to Protestantism with her husband. One evening Edith picked up an autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila and read this book all night. "When I had finished the book, I said to myself: This is the truth." Later, looking back on her life, she wrote: "My longing for truth was a single prayer."

Now here is the question: If one is convinced that one has the truth, and this truth is logically incompatible with some thesis T (e.g., Benatar's anti-natalism), is one rationally justified in rejecting T and in refusing to examine the arguments in support of it?

I would say No. Note first that the conviction that one has the truth is a mere subjective certainty. No matter how psychologically powerful this certainty is, it does not entail objective certainty. One can be subjectively certain and still be mistaken.  Christopher Hitchens, who died on this date six years ago, was subjectively certain that there is no God. Edith Stein was convinced that there is. It follows that subjective certainty does not entail objective certainty. They can't both be right; so one of the subjective certainties was merely subjective. 

Given that subjective certainty does not entail objective certainty, the really serious truth-seeker must remain open to the possibility that he is mistaken about that of which he is subjectively certain.  If he is really serious about truth, and intellectually honest, he must ongoingly examine his doxastic commitments. He must hold them tentatively. This is not to say that he will easily relinquish them; it is to say that he will remain self-critical.  This strikes me as the right attitude here below for we who are in statu viae.  Doxastic rest, if it comes at all, comes later.  To rest prematurely would seem to indicate a lack of seriousness about the pursuit of truth.  It would seem to indicate more of a desire for comfort than a desire for truth.

Related articles

A Battle of Titans: Plato Versus Aristotle

Maverick Philosopher: On the 'Inconceivability' of Death

Maverick Philosopher: Anti-Natalism and Demographics

David Benatar in <i>The New Yorker</i>

On the Logical Independence of Person and Proposition

If the Father of Lies speaks a truth per accidens, it is still a truth. And if the Father of Lights speaks a falsehood per impossibile, it is still a falsehood.

What is Fake News? Rachel's Overreach

A news item is a report of a recent event.  Must the report be true to count as a genuine news item?  I should think so. Must the report be current as well? Obviously.  It is true that Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 presidential election, but no longer news that she did.  So there are two ways for fake news to be fake: by being false and by being dated.

Now that 'fake news' is a buzz word, or a buzz phrase, we need to be alert to this ambiguity.

But there seems to be another way in which a report can be fake news. Suppose an obnoxious leftist is out to damn Trump by showing that he does not pay Federal income tax. So she gets hold of his 2005 Form 1040 which reveals that he paid millions in taxes and trumpets this information on her political TV show. This too has been called 'fake news.' Here:

Unlike Geraldo Rivera, who was pilloried after his Al Capone vault debacle, Maddow knew that what was in the Trump tax returns wasn’t damning, yet she still hyped it on Twitter and played her audience for fools, thereby becoming the epitome of fake news.

What Maddow reported is true. And we the people did not know until a few days ago what Mr Trump paid in taxes back in aught five; so there is a sense in which the item reported is current. So what makes Maddow's reportage 'fake news'? Apparently, the fact that she was out to damn Trump but somehow did not realize that revealing the contents of his 2005 Form 1040 would make him look good!  He paid more in taxes than Bernie and Barack!

I am inclined to conclude that the phrase 'fake news' does now mean much of anything, if it ever did.

Above I pointed to an ambiguity.  But it is worse than that. The phrase is vague and becoming vaguer and vaguer. Chalk it up to the vagaries of polemical discourse in this time of bitter political division.

An ambiguous word or phrase admits of two or more definite meanings; a vague word or phrase has no definite meaning.  'Fake news' is  a bit like 'buzz word' which has itself become a buzz word.

As for Rachel Maddow, she is becoming the poster girl of TDS. How else do you explain the fact that this intelligent woman did not understand that her 'scoop' would hurt her and her benighted cause while benefiting the president?  But I suppose lust for ratings comes into it too. Mindless hatred of Trump plus a lust for ratings.

Next stop: the Twilight Zone.

Related articles

Truth Decay

Hillary the Corrupt

Obama the Liar Update

Trump releases some 2005 tax info ahead of Rachel Maddow report

Rachel Maddow: People expected too much of my report on Trump's tax return

Practice Refuting Theory

You deny that there is truth, and yet you bitterly resent being lied to?

Plagiarism

How could you, Monica Crowley?  Well, at least you are in good company. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. plagiarized portions of his Boston University dissertation:

A committee of scholars appointed by Boston University concluded today [10 October 1991] that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. plagiarized passages in his dissertation for a doctoral degree at the university 36 years ago.

[. . .]

"There is no question," the committee said in a report to the university's provost, "but that Dr. King plagiarized in the dissertation by appropriating material from sources not explicitly credited in notes, or mistakenly credited, or credited generally and at some distance in the text from a close paraphrase or verbatim quotation."

[. . .]

The dissertation at issue is "A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman." Dr. King wrote it in 1955 as part of his requirements for a doctor of philosophy degree, which he subsequently received from the university's Division of Religious and Theological Studies.

Does King's plagiarism disqualify him from being honored?  No. He was a great civil rights leader and he died in the service of his cause.  

Crowley's plagiarism appears to have been much worse than King's.

Every man has his 'wobble' as I like to say, and every woman too. If we honored only those who are in all respects honorable we would honor no mortal. 

If truth be told, no one of us is all that admirable, although some of us are more admirable than others.

Obama's Legacy of Deceit

Victor Davis Hanson

Only a few more days to go . . . .

'Post-Truth'

'Post-truth' is a silly buzz word, and therefore beloved by journalists who typically talk and write uncritically in trendy ways. There is no way to get beyond truth or to live after truth.  All of our intellectual operations are conducted under the aegis of truth.

Here is one example of how we presuppose truth.  People routinely accuse each other of lying, and often the accusations are just. But to lie is to make a false statement with the intention of deceiving one's audience. A false statement is one that is not true.  It follows that if there is no truth, then there are no lies.  If we are beyond truth, then we are beyond lies as well.  But of course lies are told, so truth exists.

I could squeeze a lot of philosophical juice out of this topic, and you hope I won't.  I will content myself with some mundane observations.

'Post-truth' is used mainly to describe contemporary politics.  The idea is that it does not much matter in the political sphere whether what is said is true so long as it is effective in swaying people this way or that.  What is persuasive need not be true, and what is true need not be persuasive.  But this has has always been the case, so why the need for 'post-truth'?  Is it really so much worse these days?

For the Left, Donald Trump is the prime post-truther, the post-truth poster boy if you will, the prima Donald of the practice of post-truth. Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post doesn't expect him to truth up anytime soon. "Indeed, all signs are to the contrary — most glaringly Trump’s chock-full-­of-­lies tweet that 'I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.' "

A very stupid example, Ms. Marcus!  There is not even one lie in the tweet, let alone a bunch of them.  Although verifiable in principle, Trump's tweet is unverifiable in practice.  Trump had no solid evidence for the truth of his assertion.  Still, it could be true.  Don't forget the 'necro-vote' (a word I just coined) and the illegal vote.  Trump's epistemic 'sin' was not that he stated what is not the case with the intention to deceive but that he confidently asserted something for which he had insufficient evidence.  He pretended to know something he could not know.  Very annoying, and possibly a violation of a Cliffordian ethics of belief, but not a lie.  

So he didn't lie.  What he did was close to what Harry Frankfurt defines as bullshitting in On Bullshit, a piece of close analysis, fine, not feculent, that was undoubtedly more often purchased than perused. The bullshitter 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. 

So you could fairly tax Trump in this instance with bullshitting.  He shot his mouth off in a self-serving way without much concern over whether what he said is true.  But why pick on Trump?

Because you are a leftist and thus a purveyor of double standards.

Obama bullshits with the best of them.  A prime example was his outrageous claim that 99.9% of Muslims reject radical Islam.    It is false and known to be false. (You can check with PEW research if you care to.)   Now was Obama lying in this instance or bullshitting? A lie is not the same thing as a false statement.  Let us be perhaps excessively charitable: Obama made a false statement but he had no intention of deceiving us because he did not know the truth.  (Compare: G. W. Bush was wrong about the presence of WMDs in Iraq, but he did not lie about them:  he was basing himself on the best intelligence sources he had at the time.)

But that Obama is pretty clearly bullshitting is shown by the cliched and falsely precise 99.9% figure.  The whole context shows that Obama doesn't care whether what he is saying is true.  He said it because it fits his narrative: Islam is a religion of peace; we are not in a religious war with Islam; Muslims want all the same things we want, blah, blah, ad nauseam.  The difference between this case and the Trump tweet is that we know that Obama was wrong, whereas we don't know that Trump was wrong.

So once again we have a double standard.  Trump is 'post-truth'; but Obama and Hillary are not?

Related articles

There is No Truth, Only Bullshit

John D. Caputo's Truth Problem

How About a Six-Month Suspension Without Pay for Barack Obama?

Lie or Exaggeration or Bullshit? Politics in the Age of Bullshit

Citizens Lynching Citizens

Lie or Exaggeration or Bullshit? Politics in the Age of Bullshit

Over the weekend, Donald Trump bragged in signature style that he “won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” Lefties are calling the statement a lie.  But it is no such thing.  In the typical case, a lie is a false statement made with the intention to deceive.  In the typical case, one who lies knows the truth, but misrepresents it to his audience out of a desire to deceive them.  But no one knows the truth-value of Trump's braggadocious conditional.  It could be true, but neither Trump nor anyone else has any evidence of its truth.  Although verifiable in principle, it is not practically verifiable.

When lefties call a statement a lie which is not a lie should we say that they are lying about what it is?

Was Trump exaggerating when he made his remark?  That's not right either.

I think what we have here is a species of bullshit in the sense pinned down by a noted philosopher.  According to Harry Frankfurt, a  statement is bullshit if it is

. . . grounded neither in a belief that it is true nor, as a lie must be, in a belief that it is not true. It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth — this indifference to how things really are — that I regard as of the essence of bullshit." (emphasis added)

Professor Frankfurt has a fine nose for the essence of bullshit.  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.

Now if the bullshitter does not care about truth, what does he care about? He cares about himself, about making a certain impression. His aim is to (mis)represent himself as knowing what he does not know or more than he actually knows. Frankfurt again:

. . . bullshitting involves a kind of bluff. It is closer to bluffing, surely than to telling a lie. But what is implied concerning its nature by the fact that it is more like the former than it is like the latter? Just what is the relevant difference here between a bluff and a lie? Lying and bluffing are both modes of misrepresentation or deception. Now the concept most central to the distinctive nature of a lie is that of falsity: the liar is essentially someone who deliberately promulgates a falsehood. Bluffing too is typically devoted to conveying something false. Unlike plain lying, however, it is more especially a matter not of falsity but of fakery. This is what accounts for its nearness to bullshit. For the essence of bullshit is not that it is false but that it is phony. In order to appreciate this distinction, one must recognize that a fake or a phony need not be in any respect (apart from authenticity itself) inferior to the real thing. What is not genuine need not also be defective in some other way. It may be, after all, an exact copy. What is wrong with a counterfeit is not what it is like, but how it was made. This points to a similar and fundamental aspect of the essential nature of bullshit: although it is produced without concern with the truth, it need not be false. The bullshitter is faking things. But this does not mean that he necessarily gets them wrong. (emphasis added)

When did the Age of Bullshit begin in American politics?  Perhaps with the inauguration of Bill Clinton.  But it really gets underway with Barack Obama.  Obama is the shuck-and-jive precursor of Trump.  So let's recall some of his antics.

As Frankfurt points out, the essence of bullshit is a lack of concern for truth.  But truth and consistency are closely related notions.  Two statements are consistent (inconsistent) just in case they can (cannot) both be true.  Now I do not know if there are any cases of Obama contradicting himself synchronically (at a time), but there are plenty of examples of him contradicting himself diachronically.  He said things as a senator the opposite of which he says now.  Victor Davis Hanson supplies numerous examples in Obama as Chaos:

. . . when the president takes up a line of argument against his opponents, it cannot really be taken seriously — not just because it is usually not factual, but also because it always contradicts positions that Obama himself has taken earlier or things he has previously asserted. Whom to believe — Obama 1.0, Obama 2.0, or Obama 3.0?

When the president derides the idea of shutting down the government over the debt ceiling, we almost automatically assume that he himself tried to do just that when as a senator he voted against the Bush administration request in 2006, when the debt was about $6 trillion less than it is now.

The problem here is not merely logical; it is also ethical: the man is not truthful.  Truth, falsity, consistency, inconsistency pertain to propositions, not persons.  Truthfulness, deceitfulness, lack of concern for truth and consistency -- these are ethical attributes, properties of persons.  Obama the bullshitter is an ethically defective president.  When Nixon lied, he could be shamed by calling him on it.  That is because he was brought up properly, to value truth and truthfulness.  But the POMO Obama, like that "first black president" Bill Clinton, apparently can't be shamed.  It's all bullshit and fakery and shuckin' and jivin'.  There is no gravitas in these two 'black' presidents, the one wholly white, the other half-white.  Everything's a 'narrative' -- good POMO word, that -- and the only question is whether the narrative works in the moment for political advantage. A narrative needn't be true to be a narrative, which is why the POMO types like it.  Hanson has Obama's number:

But a third explanation is more likely. Obama simply couldn’t care less about what he says at any given moment, whether it is weighing in on the football name “Redskins” or the Travyon Martin trial. He is detached and unconcerned about the history of an issue, about which he is usually poorly informed. Raising the debt ceiling is an abstraction; all that matters is that when he is president it is a good thing and when he is opposing a president it is a bad one. Let aides sort out the chaos. Obamacare will lower premiums, not affect existing medical plans, and not require increased taxes; that all of the above are untrue matters nothing. Who could sort out the chaos?

[. . .]

The media, of course, accepts that what Obama says on any given day will contradict what he has said or done earlier, or will be an exaggeration or caricature of his opponents’ position, or simply be detached from reality. But in their daily calculus, that resulting chaos is minor in comparison to the symbolic meaning of Obama. He is, after all, both the nation’s first African-American president and our first left-wing progressive since Franklin Roosevelt.

In comparison with those two facts, no others really matter.

 

Lies, Truth, Narratives, and Hillary

Hillary Clinton we now know to be a liar beyond any shadow of a reasonable doubt.  A liar is one who habitually makes false statements with the intention of deceiving her audience.  This definition, however, presupposes the distinction between true and false statements.  Aphoristically:  no truth, no lies.  Hillary cannot be a liar unless there is truth.  But maybe there is no truth, only narratives.  Here, perhaps, is a way to defend Hillary.  Perhaps the outrageous things she says are merely parts of her narrative.  So consider:

N. There is no truth; there are only narratives.

It follows that (N) itself is only a narrative, or part of one.  For if there is no truth, then (N) cannot be true.  Is this a problem?  I should think so.  Suppose you want to persuade me to accept (N).  How will you proceed?  You can't say I ought to accept (N) because it is true.  Will you say that I ought to accept (N) because it is 'empowering'?   But it cannot BE empowering unless it is TRUE that it is empowering.  You cannot, however, invoke truth on pain of falling into inconsistency. No matter which predicate you substitute for 'empowering,' you will face the same difficulty.  If you recommend (N) on the ground that it is F, then you must say that (N) IS F, which leads right back to truth.

Being and truth are systematically connected.  The truth is the truth about what IS, and what IS is at least possibly such as to be the subject matter of truths. (A classical theist can go whole hog here and say:  necessarily, whatever IS is the subject matter of truths, and every truth is about something that IS.  But I am not assuming classical theism in this entry.)

So you can't say that (N) is empowering or conducive to winning the election or whatever; all you can say is that it is part of your narrative that (N) is empowering, or conducive . . . .  In this way you box yourself in: there is nothing you say that can BE the case; everything is a narrative or part of a narrative.  But you cannot even say that.  You cannot say that everything you say IS a narrative, only that it is part of your narrative that everything you say is a narrative.  You are sinking into some seriously deep crapola in your attempt to defend the indefensible, Hillary.

It follows from this that you cannot budge your sane opponent who holds that there is truth and that some narratives are true and others are false.  I am one of these sane people.  You cannot budge me because, according to MY narrative, there is truth and not all narratives are true.  According to my narrative, my narrative is not just a narrative.  It answers to a higher power, Truth. The only way you could budge me from my position is by appealing to truth transcendent of narrative. And that you cannot do.

So what is a poor leftist to do?  Fall into inconsistency, which is in fact what they do.  Everything is a mere narrative except when it suits them to appeal to what is the case.

It is of the essence of the contemporary Left to attempt the replacement of truth by narrative, a replacement they cannot pull off  without inconsistency.

What if the lefty embraces inconsistency?  Then, while resisting the temptation to release the safety on your 1911, you walk away, as from a block of wood.   You can't argue with a block of  wood or a shithead.  While shit has form, it lacks form supportive of rational discourse.

Related articles

Hillary the Fabulist

Obama the Liar Update

Hillary the Corrupt

Obama the Brazen Liar

Realism, Idealism, and Classical Theism

Obama the Brazen Liar

Here:

“We do not pay ransom. We didn’t here, and we won’t in the future.”

Barack Obama might like to have that one back this morning, to stick a pin in the moving finger that writes. But the finger done writ, and it won’t come back to cancel a single line of the president’s fatuous fib that the United States didn’t pay $400 million to ransom four hostages taken by the president’s friends in Tehran.

Perhaps the president can take some solace, thin as it is, in the fact that nobody believed him, anyway.

'Fatuous fib' is not quite the phrase.  It is a brazen lie from a man who specializes in the brazen lie.  And not just the lie, but every mode of mendacity.

A mere picture of the man would suffice to define homo mendax.

Vote for Hillary and you will get more of the same.  The difference between her and Obama is that she is not a very good liar.  

Why is this?  Permit me  a speculation.  Hillary is much older than Obama.  She grew up in a time when it was understood that there is such a thing as truth and that lying is wrong.  So at some level she knows she is doing wrong when she lies.  This dim awareness interferes with the efficacy of her lying.  But Obama is the POMO-prez.  Truth?  What's that?

His brand of leftist replaces truth with narrative.  

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The Left's Biggest Lie?

Obama and Pigeon Chess

Truth Decay

Rachel Dolezal, the Black White Woman

Is Paris a 'No Go' Zone?

Regret Become Denial

There are past actions one disowns to such an extent that one comes to deny having done them.  "I could never have done such a thing!"

Nixon Redivivus

Hillary's Breathtaking Mendacity.  By Andrew McCarthy.  Excerpts:

To repeat, Clinton and Obama knew it was a terrorist attack but tried to con the country, very much including the families of our dead, into believing our heroes had been killed by a spontaneous response to a video.

[. . .]

The lies about “an awful Internet video that we had nothing to do with” were dictated by the bipartisan Beltway policy of Islamist empowerment that Obama and Clinton championed. Indeed, at the time it occurred, the terrorist attack was just the latest in a series of jihadist threats and strikes in Benghazi. The policy of strategically and materially supporting Islamists made such attacks inevitable.

But it was election season. Obama and Clinton needed camouflage for the catastrophic failure of their policy. Thus: Clinton’s fustian about “an awful Internet video that we had nothing to do with.”

In point of fact, Clinton and Obama had everything to do with the anti-Islamic video trailer, Innocence of Muslims. Virtually no one would have known of it had they not tirelessly publicized it in the international media and in official American government statements that were studiously linked to the Benghazi massacre.

In reality, though, it was the video that had nothing to do with the rage and violence directed at Americans, first in Egypt, then Libya, then beyond.

The violence at the U.S. embassy in Cairo had been threatened for months by al-Qaeda operatives and was clearly planned to erupt on the eleventh anniversary of the terror network’s 9/11 atrocities. The jihadists had been empowered by both the overthrow of the Qaddafi regime in Libya, orchestrated by Obama and Clinton, and the Muslim Brotherhood takeover in Egypt, championed by Obama and Clinton.

In the weeks before September 11, 2012, al-Qaeda saber-rattled about a potential Tehran 1979–style attack on the U.S. embassy in Cairo — perhaps they’d burn it to the ground, perhaps they’d take hostages to trade for American concessions like release of the Blind Sheikh (imprisoned for terrorism convictions in the U.S.).

Administration officials knew there would be trouble on the eleventh anniversary of 9/11. They also knew that, if the trouble was perceived as the foreseeable fallout of their Islamist empowerment policy, it could mortally damage Obama’s 2012 reelection bid and Clinton’s 2016 election ambitions.

So the administration swung into action. The obscure video trailer had been condemned by a fiery mufti in Egypt. Word of it began to circulate, but almost no one had seen it. Though in some small circles it was added to the endless list of Islamist grievances against America, those grievances are ideologically driven — and Islamist ideology is incorrigibly anti-American, regardless of what pretexts are cited for acting on it.

So Clinton’s opportunistic underlings pounced, seeing the video as their chance to shape a fraudulent narrative. As Muslims — including al-Qaeda operatives — began menacing the Cairo embassy, the State Department put out a series of tweets, a transparent effort to spin the inevitable rioting as incited by the video, not enabled by the administration’s own promotion of Islamic supremacists.

The Benghazi siege began a few hours later.

In the aftermath, of course, the administration edited intelligence-community talking points in order to promote the video fraud and conceal the terrorist victory — even as Obama touted al-Qaeda’s purported demise in campaign speeches. Susan Rice, an Obama confidant and a top official in Clinton’s State Department, was dispatched to lie to the public on the Sunday shows. Obama and Clinton indignantly condemned the video in public-address announcements for Pakistani television, paid for by American tax dollars. Obama took to the podium at the United Nations to proclaim to the world that “the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.”

The administration then put the criminal-justice system in service of the fraud. Making good on Clinton’s deceitful vow, police raided the home of Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the video’s producer — arresting him in the dead of night, as if he were a violent criminal, even though he had been cooperating with law enforcement.

Why was he cooperating with law enforcement? Far from a crime, the making of the video was constitutionally protected activity — the kind of activity the executive branch is duty-bound to protect. But Nakoula went to law enforcement because Obama and Clinton’s smear had put his life in danger.

They did that, willfully, because they needed a scapegoat: Nakoula could serve the dual purposes of deceiving Americans into linking Benghazi’s dead to the video while convincing Muslims of Obama and Clinton’s longstanding commitment to subordinate constitutional free-speech rights to sharia’s blasphemy standards. Nakoula, a small-time con man whose prior conviction made him susceptible to revocation of parole, was the perfect foil.

He spent nearly a year in prison while Obama celebrated his reelection, Clinton plotted her campaign to replace him, and the Democrat-media complex helped them bury Benghazi as “old news.”

Just as she looked Charles Wood in the eye three years ago, while his son’s remains and those of three other Americans killed by jihadists lay nearby, so did Hillary Clinton look America in the eye during Thursday’s testimony. Both times, she seemed earnest, composed and determined as only a pathological liar can in the execution of a high-stakes fraud.

Raymond Ibrahim on Islamic Taqiyya

Did presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson get it right when he said that taqiyya "allows, and even encourages, you to lie to achieve your goals"?  Ibrahim argues that he did.

A Note on a Common Misunderstanding of Hypocrisy

I once heard a radio advertisement by a group promoting a "drug-free America." A male voice announces that he is a hypocrite because he demands that his children not do what he once did, namely, use illegal drugs. The idea behind the ad is that it is sometimes good to be a hypocrite.

Surely this ad demonstrates a misunderstanding of the concept of hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is a moral defect. But one who preaches abstinence and is abstinent is morally praiseworthy regardless of what he did in his youth. Indeed, his change of behavior redounds to his moral credit.

A hypocrite is not someone who fails to live up to the ideals he espouses, but one who does not attempt to live up to the ideals he espouses. An adequate definition of hypocrisy must allow for moral failure. An adequate definition must also allow for moral change. One who did not attempt to live up to the ideals he now espouses cannot be called a hypocrite; the term applies to one who does not attempt to live up to the ideals he now espouses.

After Jeb Bush admitted to smoking marijuana during his prep school days, Rand Paul called him a  hypocrite on the ground that he now opposes what he once did. 

This accusation shows a failure on Paul's part to grasp the concept of hypocrisy.

Will You Vote for Hillary?

Just realize that she is a certified liar, and not a very good one either.

One who lies on occasion is not a liar; a liar is one who habitually lies.  Is Mrs. Clinton a congenital liar as the late William Safire claimed in a 1996 NYT opinion piece?  That's rather a stretch: surely the multiple modes of her mendacity are not innate in her.  She is better described as a strategic liar: lying is part of her strategy of self-advancement.  She will lie whenever it is in her interest to do so.  The end justifies the means. 

But there is nonetheless something in her pattern of mendacity that smacks of pathology.  Why did she lie about her ancestry given how easy is the exposure of such a lie?  That suggests either pathology or an overweening hubris, as if she can get away with anything.  She is naked AMBITION in a pants suit she fancies is bullet-proof.  We shall see.  Just don't underestimate her and the machine behind her.

Related: Hillary the Fabulist.  Excerpt:

It has been said of Bill Clinton that he'd rather climb a tree and tell a lie than stand on the ground and tell the truth.  Hillary continues the family tradition.  One of her latest untruths is that all four of her grandparents came to the U.S. as immigrants when only one of them did.  She lied, brazenly, about something easily checked. To prolong the arboreal metaphor, why would she perch herself far out on a limb so easily sawn off?  Beats me. 

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Benghazigate in Historical Context

The Left's Biggest Lie?

What is largest lie of the Left these days?  I just heard Dennis Prager say that it is the lie that opposition to Obama's policies is because of his race.  If you disagree, what would be the Left's biggest lie? 

Truth, as Prager rightly and routinely says, is not a leftist value. Once you understand that a lot falls into place.

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There is No Truth, Only Bullshit

Thus the Dustin Hoffman character in Hero.  "There ain't no truth; all there is, is bullshit."  (HT: Vlastimil V.)  This very short video clip would be a good way to get your intro to phil students thinking about truth.  Some questions/issues:

1. Is it true that there is no truth?  If yes, there there is at least one truth.  If no, then there is at least one truth.  Therefore, necessarily, there is at least one truth.  This simple reflection may seem boring and 'old hat' to you, but it can come as a revelation to a student. 

2. What exactly is bullshit?  Is a bullshit statement one that is false?  Presumably every bullshit statement is a false statement, but not conversely.  There are plenty of false statements that are not bullshit.  So the property of being bullshit is not the property of being false.  Nor is it the property of being meaningless, or the property of being self-contradictory.

3. In ordinary English, 'bullshit' is often used to describe a statement that is plainly false, or a statement that one believes is plainly false, or one that either is or is believed to be a lie.  But none of these uses get at the 'essence' of bullshit. 

4. So when is a statement bullshit?

According to Harry Frankfurt, a  statement is bullshit if it is

. . . grounded neither in a belief that it is true nor, as a lie must be, in a belief that it is not true. It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth — this indifference to how things really are — that I regard as of the essence of bullshit." (emphasis added)

Professor Frankfurt has a fine nose for the essence of bullshit.  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.

Now if the bullshitter does not care about truth, what does he care about? He cares about himself, about making a certain impression. His aim is to (mis)represent himself as knowing what he does not know or more than he actually knows. Frankfurt again:

. . . bullshitting involves a kind of bluff. It is closer to bluffing, surely than to telling a lie. But what is implied concerning its nature by the fact that it is more like the former than it is like the latter? Just what is the relevant difference here between a bluff and a lie? Lying and bluffing are both modes of misrepresentation or deception. Now the concept most central to the distinctive nature of a lie is that of falsity: the liar is essentially someone who deliberately promulgates a falsehood. Bluffing too is typically devoted to conveying something false. Unlike plain lying, however, it is more especially a matter not of falsity but of fakery. This is what accounts for its nearness to bullshit. For the essence of bullshit is not that it is false but that it is phony. In order to appreciate this distinction, one must recognize that a fake or a phony need not be in any respect (apart from authenticity itself) inferior to the real thing. What is not genuine need not also be defective in some other way. It may be, after all, an exact copy. What is wrong with a counterfeit is not what it is like, but how it was made. This points to a similar and fundamental aspect of the essential nature of bullshit: although it is produced without concern with the truth, it need not be false. The bullshitter is faking things. But this does not mean that he necessarily gets them wrong. (emphasis added)

 

Truth Decay

'Truth decay' aptly describes the growing lack of concern for truth among influential players in our society.  I got the phrase from Douglas Groothuis.  Truth itself, of course, cannot decay, but truthfulness can and is.  We are in trouble, deep trouble.  Victor Davis Hanson collects some examples in Lying, Inc.:

Everyone knows that “Hands up, Don’t Shoot” was an outright lie ^[3]. Michael Brown never did or said that. Forensics, logic, and the majority of eyewitness accounts confirm that the strong-armed robber struggled with a policeman, lunged at his weapon, ran away, and then turned and charged him, not that he was executed in polite submission.

Does that lie matter? Not at all. “Ferguson” is routinely listed as proof of police racist brutality — and by no less than the president of the United States. Michael Brown is now the Paul Bunyan of the inner city. U.S. congressional representatives and professional athletes alike chant and act out “Hands up, Don’t Shoot” dramatics. The public shrugs that although it is all a lie, it is felt to be sort of true on the theory that something like that could happen one day, and thus it is OK to lie that it already has. Most knew that the strong-arm robber Michael Brown was about as likely a “gentle giant” as Trayvon Martin was still a cute preteen ^[4] in a football uniform.

Community agitator and frequent White House visitor Al Sharpton has lied repeatedly about his income taxes ^[5] and the reasons why he cannot produce accurate tax records, in the manner that he habitually lied about the Tawana Brawley case, the Duke Lacrosse caper, and the Ferguson “hands up, don’t shoot” meme. The public assumes both that Sharpton is an inveterate liar and that to dwell on the fact is either a waste of time or can incur charges of illiberality or worse. Most are more interested in his more mysterious, almost daily-changing appearance than the untruth that he hourly espouses.

Hillary Clinton, to be candid, is a habitual fabulist. She entered public life lying about everything from her 1-1000 cattle futures con to the location of her law firm’s subpoenaed legal documents. Recently she has been unable to tell the truth in any context whatsoever. She will lie about big and small, trivial and fundamental, from the immigrant myths about her grandparents to the origins of her own name Hillary to her combat exposure in the Balkans. The subtext of “what difference does it make” was something like: “Even if you find out that I lied about the run-up to and follow up on the Benghazi killings, it won’t matter in the least to my career.” She was right, of course, in her assumption that lying had career utility and brought more pluses than negatives, as her current presidential campaign attests.

Her press conference on the disappearing emails was unique in American political history in that everything Ms. Clinton said was, without exception, a demonstrable untruth. It is not that no one believes her, but rather than no one can possibly believe her when she insisted that she would have needed multiple devices for multiple email accounts, or that public officials routinely alone adjudicate what is and is not public and private communications, or that other cabinet officers apparently created, as she did, exclusively private email accounts — and servers — for public business or that security personnel on the premises protect the airwaves from hackers. Even her own supporters know that she lied, and trust that it likely will not hamper her presidential run. Her life has become about as real as that of Annie Oakley’s.

Both Hillary and Bill Clinton lied about almost every aspect of the Clinton Foundation. She knew that the foundation was created to spend 90% on travel and insider salaries and benefits, and 10% on direct grants to charities, that it offered thin moral cover to skullduggery, and that it drew donations from zillionaires, who in turn offered Bill Clinton lopsided lecture fees that he otherwise would not have commanded, and expected favorable U.S. government treatment for their cash. Hillary assumed that beneath the skin of a “charitable organization” the three Clintons ran a veritable shake down operation that resulted in mother, father, and daughter becoming multimillionaires. The Clintons will expect the issue to dissolve, either on the premise that the notoriety cannot do much more damage to the already sullied Clinton name, or that the Democratic Party feels that it can nominate no other candidate who raises as much money and is so recognizable as the proverbial prevaricator Hillary Clinton.

President Obama’s approval ratings seem to have gone up almost in direct proportion to the degree he has lied. On over twenty occasions ^[6] in reelection scenarios, Obama lied in stating that he would not issue blanket amnesties and order non-enforcement of current immigration law given that it would be unconstitutional and unlawful to do so. We accept at the time that such assurances were about as truthful as his convenient opposition to gay marriage — rhetorical constructs that warp and weave according to the realities of the next election. Who objects when Obama’s lying is felt to be for the higher cause of equality of result?

Almost every element of his promises about Obamacare — easy online signups, reduced premiums and deductibles, maintenance of current policies and doctors ^[7], national savings, and less frequent emergency room use were not just untrue, but realized in advance as simply not possible. Almost every parameter that Obama outlined in advance about the current Iranian talks proved about as true as were his redlines to Syria should it use chemical weapons. As a good community organizer, Obama accepts that his noble goals are government-mandated egalitarianism and that such utopian agendas require any means necessary to achieve them. And so he lies and the public seems bored and apparently appreciates why he must do so.

When elites customarily lie without much consequence, the public follows their examples.

Obama the Liar Update

This just in: Obama lied about the bin Laden raid.  Fits the pattern. No surprise.  A master of the multiple modes of mendacity.  And Hillary is poised to out-Obaminate him.  She is practicing hard to see how much she can get away with.

We really ought to start demanding basic truth-telling from our elected officials.

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Obama the Disaster

Hillary's Presidential Bid as an Exercise in and Referendum on Cynicism

Another penetrating column by Bret Stephens.  Excerpts:

All of which means that Mrs. Clinton’s presidential bid is an exercise in—and a referendum on—cynicism, partly hers but mainly ours. Democrats who nominate Mrs. Clinton will transform their party into the party of cynics; an America that elects Mrs. Clinton as its president will do so as a nation of cynics. Is that how we see, or what we want for, ourselves?

This is what the 2016 election is about. You know already that if Mrs. Clinton runs for president as an Elizabeth Warren-style populist she won’t mean a word of it, any more than she would mean it if she ran as a ’90s-style New Democrat or a ’70s-style social reformer. The real Hillary, we are asked to believe, is large and contains multitudes.

The allusion is to Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself" in Leaves of Grass wherein we find on p. 96 of the Signet Classic edition the lines:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

You may recall that a copy of Leaves of Grass was a gift Bill Clinton gave to Monica Lewinsky.  The meaning of that I will leave you to ponder.  Back to Stephens:

Cynicism is the great temptation of modern life. We become cynics because we desperately don’t want to be moralists, and because earnestness is boring, and because skepticism is a hard and elusive thing to master. American education, by and large, has become an education in cynicism: Our Founders were rank hypocrites. Our institutions are tools of elite coercion. Our economy perpetuates privilege. Our justice system is racist. Our foreign policy is rapacious. Cynicism gives us the comfort of knowing we won’t be fooled again because we never believed in anything in the first place. We may not be born disabused and disenchanted, but we get there very quickly.

This is the America that the Clintons seek to enlist in their latest presidential quest. I suspect many Democrats would jump at an opportunity not to participate in the exercise—it’s why they bolted for Barack Obama in 2008—and would welcome a credible primary challenger. (Run, Liz, Run!) But they will go along with it, mostly because liberals have demonized the Republican Party to the point that they have lost the capacity for self-disgust. Anything—anyone—to save America from a conservative judicial appointment.

As for the rest of the country, Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy offers a test: How much can it swallow? John Podesta and the rest of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign team must be betting that, like a python devouring a goat, Americans will have ample time to digest Mrs. Clinton’s personal ethics.

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Hillary the Fabulist

It has been said of Bill Clinton that he'd rather climb a tree and tell a lie than stand on the ground and tell the truth.  Hillary continues the family tradition.  One of her latest untruths is that all four of her grandparents came to the U.S. as immigrants when only one of them did.  She lied, brazenly, about something easily checked. To prolong the arboreal metaphor, why would she perch herself far out on a limb so easily sawn off?  Beats me. 

Now a liar is not a person who tells a lie once in a long while.  Otherwise we'd all be liars.  A liar is one who habitually  lies. Evidence mounts that Hillary is a liar.  Ed Morrissey:

As lies go, this is somewhere between the Tuzla dash and the bombed-out Belfast hotel that wasn’t. The problem for Hillary is that it fits a pattern, and that pattern’s emerging very early in a campaign that has to run for another 18 months. Every time Hillary campaigns, she begins to fantasize about her history and experience in a way that reminds voters about the Clintons and their lack of credibility. Last year, she blew up her book tour by trying to claim that she and Bill left the White House “dead broke,” even though they owned two expensive houses, Hillary had already been elected to the Senate, and both she and Bill immediately began lucrative speaking tours and got huge book advances.

Re-imagining grandparents as immigrants all by itself wouldn’t necessarily be fatal to any candidate, let alone Hillary Clinton, who’s already stretching credulity to the breaking point by running as a populist while locking up all of the establishment backers in the Democratic Party. The problem for Democrats is that it’s not all by itself, and the fabulism problem will only get worse the longer Hillary talks.

Hillary's mendacity makes a certain amount of sense if one bears in mind that truth is not a leftist value, and that for leftists winning is everything with the end justifying the means.  But only a certain amount.  How could anyone believe that her ends are served by lying about matters easily checked?  It may well be that Hillary is not just a liar, but a pathological liar.  But does any of this matter?

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Harry Reid on Burden of Proof

How About a Six-Month Suspension Without Pay for Barack Obama?

It's a funny world.  NBC anchor Brian Williams lied about a matter of no significance, in an excess of boyish braggadocio, though in doing so he injured his credibility and, more importantly, that of his employer, NBC.  We demand truth of our journalists and so Williams' suspension is as justified as the Schadenfreude at his come-down is not.  

Journalists are expected to tell the truth.  President Obama, however, lies regularly and reliably about matters of  great significance and gets away with it.  Part of it is that politicians are expected to lie.  Obama does not disappoint, taking mendacity to unheard-of levels.  There is a brazenness about it that has one admiring his cojones if nothing else.  Another part of it is that politicians are not subject to the discipline of the market in the way news anchors are.  Loss of credibility reduces viewership which reduces profits. That's the real bottom line, not the expectation of truthfulness. 

(By the way, that is not a slam against capitalism but against our greedy fallen nature which was greedy and fallen long before the rise of capitalism.  Capitalism is no more the source of greed than socialism is the source of envy.) 

Here is a recent instance of Obama's mendacity.

Obama is a master of mendacity in the multiplicity of its modes.  There is, for example, bullshitting, which is not the same as lying.  Obama as Bullshitter explains, with a little help from Professor Harry Frankfurt.

There is also the phenomenon of Orwellian Bullshit.

Pelosi's Orwellian Mendacity: A STFU Moment documents, wait for it,  Nancy Pelosi's Orwellian mendacity.

Do Communists Lie?

I just now found this at the CPUSA website:

Communists are not against religion. We are against capitalism.

A communist who is not against religion would be like a Catholic who is not against atheism or a teetotaler who is not against drinking alcoholic beverages.  

What we have here is further proof that truth is not a leftist value.

Leftists, like Islamists, feel justified in engaging in any form of mendacity so long as it promotes their agenda.  And of course the agenda, the list of what is to be done (to cop a line from V.I. Lenin), is of paramount importance  since, as Karl Marx himself wrote, "The philosophers have variously interpreted the world; the point, however, is to change it." (11th Thesis on Feuerbach). The glorious end justifies the shabby means. 

The quotation above is a piece of Orwellian mendacity. 

As for Islamists, their doctrine in support of deception is called taqiyya.

Islamism is the communism of the 21st century.

You should not take at face value anything any contemporary liberal says.  Always assume they are lying and then look into it.  Obama, of course, is the poster boy for the endlessly repeated big brazen lie.  It is right out of the commie playbook.  "If you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan."

Companion post:  Orwellian Bullshit

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Obama the Disaster

My man Hanson:

The only mystery about the last six years is how much lasting damage has been done to the American experiment, at home and abroad. Our federal agencies are now an alphabet soup of incompetence and corruption. How does the IRS ever quite recover? Will the Secret Service always be seen as veritable Keystone Cops? Is the GSA now a reckless party-time organization? Is the EPA institutionalized as a rogue appendage of the radical green movement with a director who dabbles in online pseudonyms? Do we accept that the Justice Department dispenses injustice or that the VA can be a lethal institution for our patriots? Is NASA now a Muslim outreach megaphone as we hire Russia, the loser of the space race, to rocket us into orbit?

[. . .]

Every statistic that Obama has produced on Obamacare enrollment, deportation, unemployment and GDP growth is in some ways a lie. Almost everything he has said about granting amnesty was untrue, from his own contradictions to the congressionally sanctioned small amnesties of prior presidents. Almost every time Obama steps to the lectern we expect two things: he will lecture us on our moral failings and what he will say will be abjectly untrue.

Read it all.

At this late date it is beyond clear that no more brazen liar has ever occupied the White House.  He is not just a liar; he is a consummate master of the manifold modes of mendacity.

See Towards a Typology of Untruthfulness.

The Party of Pinocchio

The Democrats ought to retire the jackass as their totem and adopt Pinocchio, the better to represent the depths of mendacity into which they have sunk.

I now hand off to Ron Radosh.

Related: Obama as Bullshitter

As Dennis Prager likes to point out, truth is not a leftist value.

How to Tell the Truth without being Truthful

Mainstream media accounts of Michael Brown of Ferguson fame repeatedly refer to him as an "unarmed teenager."  You may recall Rodney King and the repeated press references to him as a "motorist."  Trayvon Martin, we were often told,  was a "child." Was Brown an unarmed teenager,  King a motorist, and Martin a child?  Yes, but by the same token Hitler was a head of state and in that one respect no different from Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. 

Here then is one of the more interesting modes of mendacity.  One implements one's intention to deceive, not by stating a falsehood as is typical with lying, but by stating a truth, one that diverts attention from more important contextualizing truths.  One exploits the belief that unarmed teenagers, motorists, and children are typically harmless in order to distract one's audience from such uncomfortable realities as that Brown attacked a police officer and tried to wrest his weapon away from him; King violated intersections at a high rate of speed, endangered his passenger, tried to outrun the police, and resisted a lawful arrest; Martin launched a vicious deadly attack on a man he believed to be unarmed after threatening him with death.

The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.  We need to hold journalists to that standard.

Victor Davis Hanson on Obama the Mendacious

Here (HT: Bill Keezer):

[. . .]

Barack Obama is once again lamenting the charge that he is responsible for pulling all U.S. peacekeepers out of Iraq, claiming that the prior administration is culpable. But Obama negotiated the withdrawal himself. We know that not because of right-wing talking points, but because of the proud serial claims of reelection candidate Obama in 2011 and 2012 that he deserved credit for leaving Iraq ^[6]. That complete pullout prompted Joe Biden to claim the Iraq policy was the administration’s likely “greatest achievement” and buoyed Obama to brag that he was leaving a stable and secure Iraq. Think of the logic: pulling all soldiers out of Iraq was such a great thing that I now can brag that I am not responsible for it ^[7].

In regards to Syria, does Obama remember that he issued red lines should the Assad regime use chemical or biological weapons? Why then would he assert that the international community had done so, not Barack Obama? Think of the logic: I issued tough threats, and when my bluff was called, someone else issued them.

If Obama were to readdress Benghazi, would anyone believe him? What would he say? That he was in the Situation Room that evening? That he was correct in telling the UN that a (suddenly jailed) video maker prompted the violence? That the consulate and annex were secure and known to be so? That Susan Rice was merely parroting CIA talking points? Think of the logic: a video maker was so clearly responsible for the Benghazi killings that we will never have to mention his culpability again.

Does anyone believe the president that ISIS are “jayvees,” ^[8] or that al Qaeda is on the run, or that there is no connection between the ascendance of ISIS and the loud but empty boasting of red lines in Syria and complete withdrawal from Iraq? (If we had taken all troops out of South Korea in 1953 — claiming that we had spent too much blood and treasure and that the Seoul government was too inept — would there be a Kia or Hyundai today, or a North Korea in control of the entire Korean peninsula?) Think of the logic: the ISIS threat is so minimal that we need not be alarmed and therefore Obama is sending planes and advisors back into Iraq to contain it. If Obama truly believes that pulling all troops out made Iraq more secure, what will putting some back in do?

Was there any Obama boast about his Affordable Care Act that proved true: Keep your doctor? Keep your health plan? Save $2,500 in annual premiums? Lower the deficit? Lower the annual costs of health care? Win the support of doctors? Simplify sign-ups with a one-stop website? Enjoy lower deductibles? Think of the logic: you will all benefit from a new take-over of health care by a government whose assertions of what it was going to accomplish were proved false in the first days of its implementation.

There are many possible explanations about why the president of the United States simply says things that are not true or contradicts his earlier assertions or both. Is Obama just inattentive, inured to simply saying things in sloppy fashion without much worry whether they conform to the truth? Or is he a classical sophist who believes how one speaks rather than what he actually says alone matters: if he soars with teleprompted rhetoric, what does it matter whether it is true? If Obama can sonorously assert that he got America completely out of Iraq, what does it matter whether that policy proved disastrous or that he now denies that he was responsible for such a mistake?

Is Obama so ill-informed ^[9] that he embraces the first idea that he encounters, without much worry whether these notions are antithetical to his own prior views or will prove impossible to sustain?

On a deeper level, Obama habitually says untrue things because he has never been called on them before. He has been able throughout his career to appear iconic to his auditors. In the crudity of liberals like Harry Reid and Joe Biden, Obama ancestry and diction gave reassurance that he was not representative of the black lower classes and thus was the receptacle of all sorts of liberal dreams and investments. According to certain liberals, he was like a god, our smartest president, and of such exquisite sartorial taste that he must become a successful president. In other words, on the superficial basis of looks, dress, and patois, Obama was reassuring to a particular class of white guilt-ridden grandees and to such a degree that what he actually had done in the past or promised to do in the future was of no particular importance.

[. . .]

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Orwellian Mendacity and Blatant Distortion at The New York Times

Left-wing bias at the NYT is nothing new, of course, but the following  opening paragraph of a July 8th editorial is particularly egregious.  But before I quote it, let me say that the problem is not that the editors have a point of view or even that it is a liberal-left point of view.  The problem is their seeming inability, or rather unwillingness, to present a matter of controversy in a fair way.  Here is the opening paragraph of Hobby Lobby's Disturbing Sequel:

The Supreme Court violated principles of religious liberty and women’s rights in last week’s ruling in the Hobby Lobby case, which allowed owners of closely held, for-profit corporations (most companies in America) to impose their religious beliefs on workers by refusing to provide contraception coverage for employees with no co-pay, as required by the Affordable Care Act. But for the court’s male justices, it didn’t seem to go far enough.

This is a good example of the sort of Orwellian mendacity we have come to expect from the Obama administration and its supporters in the mainstream media.  War is peace.   Slavery is freedom.  A defense of religious liberty is a violation of religious liberty.   Those who protest being forced by the government to violate their consciences and religious beliefs are imposing their religious beliefs. The Orwellian template: X, which is not Y, is Y. 

Every statement in the opening paragraph of the NYT editorial is a lie.  The 5-4 SCOTUS decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby defended principles of religious liberty.  It did not violate any women's rights.  Neither the right to an abortion nor the right to purchase any form of contraception were affected by the decision.  The ACA mandate to provide contraceptives was not overturned but merely restricted so that Hobby Lobby would not be forced to provide four  abortifacient contraceptives.

I won't say anything about the ridiculous insinuation in the last sentence, except that arguments don't have testicles.

Truth is not a value for the Left. Winning is what counts, by any means.  They see politics as  war, which is why they feel justified in their mendacity.

The quite narrow question the Supreme Court had to decide was whether closely held, for-profit corporations are persons under the Religious Freedom and Restoration Act . "RFRA states that “[the] Government shall not substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion.”3 (Ibid.)

If Hobby Lobby is forced by the government to provide abortifacients to its employees, and Hobby Lobby is a person in the eyes of the law, then the government's Affordable Care Act mandate is in violation of the Religious Freedom and Restoration Act.  For it would substantially burden Hobby Lobby's proprietors' exercise of religion if they were forced to violate their own consciences by providing the means of what they believe to be murder to their employees.  So the precise question that had to be decided was whether Hobby Lobby is a person in the eyes of the law.  The question was NOT whether corporations are persons in the eyes of the law, as some benighted cmmentators seems to think.

Note also that the issue here is not constitutional but statutory: the issue has solely to do with the interpretation and application of a law, RFRA.  As Alan Dershowitz explains (starting at 7:52), it has to do merely with the "construction of a statute."

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Lost IRS E-Mails?

This from the AP:

Congressional investigators are fuming over revelations that the Internal Revenue Service has lost a trove of emails to and from a central figure in the agency's tea party controversy.

The IRS said Lois Lerner's computer crashed in 2011, wiping out an untold number of emails that were being sought by congressional investigators. The investigators want to see all of Lerner's emails from 2009 to 2013 as part of their probe into the way agents handled applications for tax-exempt status by tea party and other conservative groups.

Lerner headed the IRS division that processes applications for tax-exempt status. The IRS acknowledged last year that agents had improperly scrutinized applications by some conservative groups.

Her computer crashed and she lost the e-mail?  Mendacity on stilts.  Typical Obama administration bullshit.  A computer crash does not cause the loss of e-mail: the stuff is stored on the e-mail provider's server.  We all know that.  One is struck by the chutzpah of these IRS liars.  What contempt they have for the people who pay their salaries!  See  fourth article below.

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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)

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Why Would Obama Say He is not Ideological?

Why Would Obama Say He is not Ideological?

Ed Rogers speculates:

The president’s belief that little of what he does is ideologically driven suggests he is living with a pampered, unchallenged mind. He has been told he is so smart for so long that he sees only clarity in his actions and unchallengeable reason in his conclusions. The president’s belief in his own intellect makes him think that whatever he does is simply the only thing a thinking person would do. Nothing ideological about that.

Roger's reading is possible, but not likely.  I incline to  a darker view.  Obama knows that he is a leftist and that leftism is not the only option.  He knows that there are sincere, highly intelligent, principled people who oppose the leftist agenda with an impressive armamentarium of facts and arguments.   Although Obama hangs with his sycophantic own for the most part, he cannot not know about the black conservative Thomas Sowell, for example, and his views.  And given how smart Obama is supposed to be, he will have discerned that Sowell and other black conservatives cannot be dismissed as Uncle Toms.

When Obama said that he is not ideological he was simply lying.  He was stating something he knows to be false with the intent to deceive.

It is right in line with what he said last month:

As soon as I took office, I asked this Congress to send me a recovery plan by President's Day that would put people back to work and put money in their pockets. Not because I believe in bigger government -- I don't.

In this example, Obama's mendacity enters the Orwellian.  Opposing bigger government, he is for smaller government.  Bigger government is smaller government. 

The truth is that the man is thoroughly untruthful.  Why does he so brazenly lie, bullshit, prevaricate?  Because he believes that there is nothing wrong with mendacity in the service of a noble cause.  I don't think the man is simply out for his own wealth and power: he sincerely believes in the leftist agenda and that the glorious end justifies and requires the mendacious means.

For this reason he never comes clean about his real goals and values.

If you think about it this way, it all makes sense.  He had to lie again and again about the content of the ACA.  Otherwise it would not have passed.  He knows best what is good for us, and his lies are for our own good.

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Pelosi's Orwellian Mendacity: A STFU Moment

This from Nancy Pelosi's website (emphasis added):

The Affordable Care Act, signed into law by President Obama in 2010, ensures that all Americans have access to quality, affordable health care and significantly reduces long-term health care costs. This historic legislation, in the league of Social Security and Medicare, will lead to healthier lives, while providing the American people with more liberty to pursue their hopes and dreams.

This is another good example of an Orwellian use of language.  Americans love liberty and so Pelosi, in an attempt to deceive, works 'liberty' into her statement,  advancing a claim of Orwellian absurdity, namely, that limitations on the liberty of individuals and private entities are in reality enhancements of liberty.

War is peace.   Slavery is freedom.  Less liberty is more liberty. The Orwellian template: X, which is not Y, is Y. 

Obviously, Obamacare entails a reduction in liberty via its various mandates and penalties for not obeying the mandates.  There is first of all the individual mandate that requires that citizens buy health insurance or else pay a fine or tax or fee.  Obviously, if the government forces you to buy something when you were not forced to buy that thing before,  that is a lessening of one's liberty, not an increase of it.  There are also employer mandates and HHS mandates.  Overview here.  I should think that if a man is forced to buy a policy that necessarily includes maternity care, then that is a reduction in cjoice not an enhancement thereof.  But maybe I'm wrong and Big Bro is right.  Maybe less choice = more choice.

What would Pelosi have to say to be intellectually honest?  She would have to admit that on a progressive scheme such as the one she favors, while liberty is a value, liberty is trumped by the value of (material) equality or 'fairness.'   Conservatives see it the other way around.  This is part of the "conflict of visions," to borrow a very useful phrase from Thomas Sowell.

But instead of being honest, Pelosi and many of the rest of her ilk try to have it both ways at once: more government control of one's life and more liberty.

This is what could be called a STFU moment,  Nancy, you either speak the truth, or STFU.  Nancy has a right to her vision of an ideal society.  But she has no right to her stealth tactics and her Orwellianisms.

I would say the same to Obama.  Come clean, my man!  Man up!  Make the case for your progressive vision and all that it entails:  robust, 'energetic' government; increased wealth redistribution via government-controlled health care; a retreat from American exceptionalism; a "fundamental transformation of America."  Make the case as best you can and try to respond to the libertarian/conservative objections as best you can.  Let's have a 'conversation.'  Aren't you guys big on 'conversations'?

But if you try t0 win by cheating and lying and prevaricating and bullshitting, then:  STFU.  Man up or STFU.

Obama and Pelosi and the Dems want us to trust them.  "Just trust us; when the ACA is implemented you will then know what is it and and you will experience its manifold benefits."  If Obama would be our collective mama, then we have to be able to trust him or her.

Unfortunately, Obama has lied brazenly about the content of the ACA some 30 times, and then lied about his lying.  His supporters have lied and prevaricated and obfuscated as well. 

So why should we trust anything Obama or any Dem says from this moment on?

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An Incorrect Promise?

This from The New York Times:

The split between lawmakers and the White House reflects the dilemma the president finds himself in as he seeks to follow through on last week’s acknowledgment about his incorrect promise on health care coverage.

A statement is either true or false, correct or incorrect.  "No Republican voted for Obamacare' is a statement and it happens to be true or correct.  But it is incoherent to speak of a promise as either correct or incorrect.  'I promise to loan you $100 on Friday' is a promise, not a statement.   A promise is either fulfilled or not fulfilled.  If, come Friday, I loan you $100, then I fulfill my promise.  If I don't, then either (i) the promise I made is insincere, or (ii) something happened outside my control that prevented me from loaning you the money, or (iii) I reneged on my promise.

To speak of Obama's now famous lie -- If you like your health plan  you can keep your health plan, period --  as an incorrect promise shows total confusion or perhaps willful obfuscation.   First, there is no such thing as an incorrect promise.  Second, a lie is not a promise.  Obama lied about the already existent content of the ACA.  He did not promise what that content would be.

And then Bubba comes along to add a further layer of incoherence and absurdity to this sorry spectacle.

Under pressure from Bill Clinton, Obama yesterday tried to correct his 'incorrect promise'  by changing the law, something he is not constitutionally authorized to do.  The passing , repealing, and amending of laws is a legislative function, not an executive function. 

Are we in Cloud Cuckoo Land yet?

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The Dictionary Definition of Lying Again: Hanson's Counterexample

I dedicate this, and all subsequent posts on lying and the several senses of 'is,' to Bill Clinton and Barack Obama who, by their brazen mendacity, have inadvertently fueled the fires of logico-linguistic inquiry.

...........

Tony Hanson e-mails and I comment in blue:

I hope things are well for you. Sorry for the haste of this message but time is a commodity of which lowly adjuncts have little.

Your posts on lying are interesting. You hint at this in one of your posts but I have not seen anyone raise questions about whether a falsehood is a necessary condition for lying. Further evidence perhaps of the family resemblance approach:

Shady, Bonnie and Clyde rob a bank. They stash the loot under the wood pile at the hideout. A few days later Clyde notices the money is gone. Shady and Bonnie, in a conspiracy to take the loot for themselves, bury it under the oak tree at the cemetery. Clyde drags Shady out of the house and demands to know where the money is. In an attempt to deceive Clyde, he says the money is buried under the bridge by the river. Clyde drags Shady down to the bridge and to Shady's chagrin there is the loot. (Bonnie had moved the loot from the oak tree to the bridge in attempt to have it for herself).

So Shady's statement that the loot was at the bridge was true, though he did attempt to deceive. Did Shady lie or not?

Is a false statement necessary [for a lie] or just the belief that a statement is false?

BV:  Counterexamples to the dictionary definition similar to Hanson's were proposed by Monokroussos and Lupu in the discussion threads and are familiar from the literature.  Here is the dictionary definition (that I was defending):

D1.  To lie =_df  to make a false statement with the intention to deceive.

Given the Shady example, I think we have three options:

A. Take it as a clear case of lying and reject or revise the dictionary definition.
B.  Hold fast to (D1) and maintain that Shady did not lie.
C.  Maintain that there is no one univocal sense of 'lie' in English but rather a family of related senses at the center of which is the paradigmatic sense, a sense captured by (D1).

Here is a revision:

D2. To lie =_df  to make an untruthful statement with the intention to deceive.

An untruthful statement is one that is believed to be false by the maker of the statement and hence can be either true or false.

Here is a problem with (D2).  Jones is under audit by the IRS.  The high number of personal exemptions he claimed flagged him for audit.  Jones, who has no children,  say to an IRS agent, intending to deceive him, "All of my children live at home."   Since Jones has no children, he does not believe it to be false or true that they live at home.   And yet Jones is presumably lying to the IRS agent.  (Example via Chisholm ia SEP article.)

But back to our metaphilosophical quandary.  I suspect that each of (A)-(C) leads to trouble, but (C) leads to less trouble.  Philosophers have proposed a number of definitions, see the SEP article on lying and deception, but no consensus has been reached.  This does not prove that no consensus can be reached or that the quest for a definition must end in failure.  But it is pretty good evidence for this conclusion.

As for the (B) approach, I could just insist that (D1) captures the essence of lying.  But lacking as I do special access to Plato's topos ouranos, that insistence would smack of arbitrarity.

So what exactly is wrong with the (C) approach?  Peter Lupu in conversation suggested that this leads to the abandoning of the ancient Platonic project  of seeking the natures of justice, knowledge, virtue, and so on.  But maybe not.  If some concepts are family-resemblance concepts, it doesn't follow that all are.  It could be that there are incorrect and correct (literal) uses of 'lies' and cognates, but that the correct uses are not unified by one univocal sense, but form a resemblance class.  Thus there would be no strict One to their Many.  But it would not follow that there are no strict ones-in-manys or ones-over-manys.

Consider this list:

lie
lie
lie.

How many words?  One or three?  Can't be both.  Make a distinction.  There are three tokens of the same type.  The type is a one-in-many.  We could also say that if each token is used in the (D1)-sense, there is exactly one sense common to all three uses.

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