Maverick Philosopher

On Misusing the Word 'Lie'

Keith Burgess-Jackson rightly criticizes Rush Limbaugh for using

. . . the terms "calculated lie," "purposeful lie," "intentional lie," and "knowing lie" (while referring to Barack Obama's claim that Americans could, if they so chose, keep their insurance policy and their doctor). Calculation, purpose, intention, and knowledge are built into the concept of a lie, so qualifying the term "lie" in these ways is redundant and has the unfortunate effect of draining the word "lie" of its meaning. Limbaugh uses "lie" as though it meant "falsehood." It means far more than "falsehood." A lie is a very special falsehood.

Right.  I will now take the ball and run with it.

Every  lie is a false statement, but not every false statement is a lie.  A lie is a false statement made with the intention to deceive.  Since intention to deceive is included within the concept lie, 'intentional lie' and its cousins are pleonastic.  Someone who speaks of an intentional lie is treating the species as if it were a genus.  'Intentional lie' is like 'true fact.'  Use of these pleonasms marks one as uneducated or worse. 

There are two related mistakes one must avoid.  The first is the redundancy mistake just mentioned.  The other is the use of 'lie' to mean a false statement.  The temptation to do so is strong indeed.  Many of us are inclined to think our opponents not just wrong, but culpably wrong: you lied!   Michael Medved  speaks irresponsibly of ten big lies about America.  But none of his ten falsehoods -- and I agree with him that they are all of them falsehoods -- is properly describable as a lie. 

Here is one: "The two-party system is broken, and we urgently need a viable third party."

Like Medved, I consider that to be false.  But is it a lie?  Do the people who believe the quoted sentence know the truth but are out to deceive us?  Of course not.  I met a woman once who claimed that the moon was its own source of light.  Was she lying?  She uttered a falsehood, which is not the same as lying. Once I jokingly said to my wife that she was lying when she said that the room was cold.  "You lie!"  First of all, there is no fact of the matter as to whether or not the room is cold.  Her cold is my hot. So what's to lie about?  The only fact of the matter in the vicinity is wifey's feeling cold. 

Jethro claims that the bottle is half-empty while Earl maintains that it is half-full.  Is one of these yahoos lying?  Here there is a fact of the matter but one describable in two equivalent ways.

If a person affirms (denies) the existence of God is the person lying?  Here there is a fact of the matter but one hard to make out.  It is rational to be a theist, but also rational to be an atheist.  So perhaps my definition needs augmenting:

A lie is a false statement made with the intention to deceive about a definite matter of fact about which knowledge is possible.

To lie is to misrepresent willfully the way things are when the way things are is ascertainable with a fairly high degree of certainty.  For example,  the way things are with respect to the content of PPACA is easily ascertained: you just read the law.  There is a matter of fact as to what is stated in the law and that fact is easily established.

Suppose you and I are discussing some very difficult question in mathematics or metaphysics or cosmology.   I assert that p while you assert that not-p.  It follows that one of us is wrong.  But it does not follow that one of us is lying.

Suppose that A and B each have the intention to deceive the other.  A asserts that p, while B asserts its negation.  It is a very interesting question whether both are lying.  One of them is lying, for at least one of them is saying  something false with the intention to deceive.  But are both lying?  Is the intention to deceive sufficient for lying, or must the content asserted also be false? 

Here is a further nuance that will bore some of you.  The type-token distinction comes into play.  "The two-party system is broken, and we urgently need a viable third party" is not a statement but a statement type.  You don't get a statement until some definite person utters or otherwise tokens the type.  (To token a type is to produce a token of the type.)  But no statement-type can be a lie.  For statement-types float free of language users, and to have a statement, an occurrent stating, a particular speaker must use the statement-type -- must token the type -- on a particular occasion.  This is another reason to deny that Medved's ten big falsehoods are lies.  Note that a falsehood is false whether or not anyone utters or otherwise tokens a sentence that expresses it.  But a lie is not a lie whether or not anyone utters or otherwise tokens the sentence that expresses it.

It is also worth observing that the concept lie as I have defined it is not a normative concept.  The definition merely tells us what a lie is.  A lie is a statement made with the intention to deceive.  But it is a further question whether deception is morally impermissible.  And if it is, is it so in all cases or only in some? 

Is a liar one who lies?  No.  One can lie without being a liar just as one can get drunk without being a drunkard.  A liar is one who habitually lies.  Does it suffice for a person to be a liar that he lie habitually about just one topic, or must he lie habitually about more than one topic?  Interesting question.

Obama lied repeatedly when he said that under his collectivist scheme every one would get to keep his health plan if he so desired.  May we infer that Obama is a liar?  Or to judge him to be a liar must we also adduce his other (repeated) lies?

And then there is the epistemology of the situation.  How do I know that Obama lied when he made his now-famous asseveration?  I didn't peer into his soul. I know, or at least I have good reasons for believing that he lied, because he knows the subject-matter of his false statement  and he had a very powerful motive for misrepresenting said subject-matter.  Had he spoken the truth, it is a very good bet that the PPACA would not have passed and become law.

So plenty of evidence points in the direction of his being a damned liar.

Addendum 3 November

Dennis Monokroussos comments:

Apropos your post “On Misusing the Word ‘Lie’”, it would be better to say that a lie is (among other things) a statement its utterer believes to be false. Also, similarly, your augmented definition seems to require the same qualification; to wit, that it’s about something believed to be “a definite matter of fact about which knowledge is possible”.

My initial definition was this

1. A lie is a false statement made with the intention to deceive.  (That is to be understood as a biconditional: for any x, x is a lie iff x is a statement made with the intention to deceive.)

DM suggests

2. A lie is a statement believed by its utterer to be false that is made with the intention to deceive.

(2), however, allows for the possibility of a true lie.  For suppose a statement is made with the intention to deceive but is falsely believed by the utterer to be false.  In such a situation the utterer says something true with the intention to deceive.  Has he lied?

Well, what are we trying to do here?  If we are trying to capture the ordinary language meaning of 'lie' and cognates, then I am inclined to say that (2) fails.  For in ordinary English, a lie is a falsehood, though not every falsehood is a lie. I am making an empirical claim about  English as she is spoken by people like me and Monokroussos (educated white male Americans not too far apart in age).  People like us do not use 'lie' in such a way that it is sufficient for x to be a lie that x be made with the intention to deceive.

Having made an empirical claim, I am open to empirical refutation by a linguist.

If, on the other hand, we are trying to elaborate a systematic theory of lying, bullshitting and related truth-sensitive phenomena, a project that involves replacing the ordinary language concept with a supposedly better one, then perhaps (2) is acceptable.

But now we are headed for the metaphilosophical stratosphere.   What is the role of ordinary language analysis in philosophical theorizing?  Ought philosophy be theoretical and explanatory at all?  Should it perhaps content itself with description?  What is analysis anyway?  And what about the paradox of analysis?  And so on and so forth.

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Bill Maher shuts down Wasserman Schultz: 'Come on. . . that is a lie'

Truth and Truthfulness

The Wages of Presidential Deception

Barack Obama does not have proprietary rights in presidential mendacity: he has many illustrious predecessors.  But Obama has pushed the arts of deception, prevarication, and empty bluster to new heights.  Unfortunately for him, the economy is bad, which fact will make it difficult for him to get away with his lies, bullshit, and Orwellian abuses of the English language.

I'll give the guy this much:  it takes balls of brass and chutzpah on stilts to lie brazenly about what can be easily checked.  Was he ever a used car salesman?  Of course, he would have spoken of 'pre-owned vehicles.'

So much for my little summary of VDH's latest.

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Exaggeration

Not content to say what is true, people exaggerate thereby turning the true into the false. This post analyzes a particular type of exaggeration which is illustrated by something Dennis Prager said on his radio show one morning:  "Happiness is a moral obligation, not a psychological state."  Since I agree that we have a moral obligation to try to be happy, I won't say anything more about the first half of Prager's assertion.  What I object to is the second half.  Why does he say something that is plainly false?  What we have here is a form of exaggeration.  Prager wants to convey to us something that he, rightly, believes is important, namely, that we ought to strive to be happy, both for our own benefit and for the benefit of others.  In order to emphasize the point, to throw it into relief as it were, he follows it up with another assertion whch is false, namely, that happiness is not a psychological state.  Obviously, if I am happy, I am in a psychological  state.  What interests me is the pattern or form of this type of exaggeration which is this:

To emphasize that a is F, say 'a is F but not G' even though a is G.

Three examples from sober philosophers.

Martin Buber, who is certainly no Frenchman, writes that "a melody is not composed of tones, nor a verse of words. . ." (I and Thou, p. 59) His point is that a melody cannot be reduced to its individual notes, nor a verse to its constituent words. But he expresses this truth in a way that makes it absurdly false. A melody without tones would be no melody at all. The litterateur exaggerates for literary effect, but Buber is no mere litterateur. So what is going on?

For a second example, consider Martin Heidegger. Somewhere in Sein und Zeit he writes that Das Dasein ist nie vorhanden. The human being is never present-at-hand. This is obviously false in that the human being  has a body which is present-at-hand in nature as surely as any animal or stone. What he is driving at is the truth -- or at least the plausibility -- that the human being enjoys a special mode of Being, Existenz, that is radically unlike the Vorhandenheit of the mere thing in nature and the Zuhandenheit of the tool. So why doesn't he speak the truth, and nothing but the truth, without exaggerating?

And then there is Ludwig Wittgenstein, who, according to J. N. Findlay, "took every wrong turn a philosopher can take." (Personal communication) Wittgenstein's fideism involves such absurd exaggerations as that religions imply no theoretical views. But when a Christian, reciting the Apostle's Creed, says "I believe in God the Father, almighty creator of heaven and earth . . ." he commits himself thereby to the metaphysical view that heaven and earth have a certain ontological status, namely, that of being creatures.

Of course, the Christian is doing more than this: his 'I believe' expresses trust in God as a person and not mere belief that certain propositions are true. But to deny that there is any propositional  content to his belief would be ludicrous. And yet that appears to be what Wittgenstein is doing.

Obama as Bullshitter

While listening the other day to Barack Obama shuck and jive about fiscal responsiblity, shamelessly posturing as if he and not his Republican opponents is the fiscally responsible one,  when he is in truth the apotheosis or, if you prefer, the Platonic Form of fiscal irresponsibility, I realized just how uncommonly good our POMO Prez is at bullshitting.  He is indeed a consummate bullshitter.  But what is it to bullshit, exactly?  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 care 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)

Now what does this have to do with Obama?  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.

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Lying in the Age of Obama

This may well be the best column Victor Davis Hanson has written.  He meticulously documents the widespread lying, prevarication, and other offenses against truth among our elites, offers a diagnosis, and then addresses the question, Why not lie?  Here is his beautiful answer:

I end with three reasons to tell the truth. The majority has to tell the truth — to the IRS, to the police, to the DA, to the census — if a consensual society is to work. You readers tell the truth so that the society can survive an Eric Holder or Mike Barnicle. Average people must speak honestly or our elites’ lies will overwhelm, even destroy us. If 100 million tell the IRS lies during audits or take the 5th Amendment, our voluntary tax system collapses. We can take only so many Lois Lerners.

Two, this often sordid, sometimes beautiful world is not the end. There is transcendence. Lies damage our soul. Selling out in the here and now has consequences later on. If you are religious, your immortal soul is lost. If you are not, at least consider that your legacy, heritage, and remembrance are forever ruined. Ask the ghost of Stephen Ambrose. What good was all that money, all those interviews if based on a lie? All the insight and delight that he brought millions of readers was tarnished. And for what, exactly?

Third, we must strive to be tragic heroes, perhaps not as dramatic as Ajax, not as cool as Shane. Would you rather have been Ethan Edwards or Will Kane or have run Lehman Brothers in 2008? Sometimes, in less dramatic fashion, the choices are that Manichean.

We must try to tell the truth, not doctor films, edit tapes, erase talking points, or lie before Congress, fabricate heroic war records, or invent false sources. Again, why? Because we seek to do the right thing with the full resignation that in the here and now we will often still lose and will lose often and gladly telling the truth.

“We always lose,” says Chris at the end of the The Magnificent Seven after he did the right thing. Or to paraphrase the cinematic T.E. Lawrence about Auda Abu Tayi, we will not lie, as do our elites, because it is simply “our pleasure” ^[32] not to.

The second reason is the best, though I would add that legacy counts for little: the vast majority of us will be forgotten and our works with us.  We will be lucky to end up footnotes in unread archives, archives themselves slated for eventual deletion.  This world is a vanishing quantity and we who for a time strut its stage even more so.

Care of the soul is the solid reason to love and honor truth.

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Truth and Truthfulness

The bathroom scale doesn't lie, but it doesn't tell the truth either.  It is either accurate or inaccurate.  Only a spiritual being can be either deceptive or truthful.

I cannot lie by simply saying something false. I must have the intention to deceive.  That is perfectly clear.  Rather less obvious is that to tell the truth it does not suffice to say something true: I must also have the intention to be truthful.

"He told the truth but he wasn't being truthful" is not a contradiction.  This is no more a contradiction than "He said something false but he wasn't intending to deceive."  But how could one tell the truth without being truthful?  One way is by saying something that happens to be true while intending to deceive.  Another way is by saying something true to distract the hearer from the salient issue.  A third way is by saying something true but omitting other truths relevant to the contextualization and understanding of the first. 

Suppose the following sentence is true: "Jane shot Sam several times in the chest with a .45 caliber pistol after he came at her with a knife threatening to rape her."  Someone who assertively utters the first independent clause  while omitting to utter the second has said something true without being truthful.

In sum, one can say what is false without being untruthful and one can say what is true without being truthful.

Persons, not propositions, are truthful or the opposite.  Propositions, not persons, are true or the opposite. 

And yet there is some connection between truth and truthfulness.   

Here is a mere  outline of an argument.  In a world without mind there could be no truth. For truth is some sort of correspondence or adequation of mind and world.  There are no free-floating truths, no Wahrheiten an sich.  Truth is moored in mind.  But truth is absolute: it transcends the contents and powers of finite minds.  The true is not what you or I believe or what all of us believe.  Nor is the true the believable.  The true is not the rationally acceptable, not even the rationally at the ideal limit of inquiry.  The true is not the warrantedly assertible.  There no viable epistemic/doxastic analysis of the truth predicate.  And yet truth involves mind.  Enter divine mind.  The truth is grounded in the divine truthfulness.  In God, truth and truthfulness colaesce.

Well, I warned you that it was a mere outline.  Brevity is the soul of blog.

Obama Lied Last Night About Arizona Senate Bill 1070

Here is the video clip of Obama lying to Romney and the rest of us in their second debate.  Obama lies when he claims that on the Arizona law (S. B. 1070) law enforcement  officers can stop people whom they merely suspect of being undocumented workers. Obama has told this lie before. 

The details are in an earlier post which I now reproduce:

Debra Saunders' article begins:

President Barack Obama hailed the Supreme Court's 5-3 decision Monday that struck down most of Arizona's 2010 immigration law. In a statement released by the White House, however, the president said that he remains "concerned about the practical impact of the remaining provision of the Arizona law that requires local law enforcement officials to check the immigration status of anyone they even suspect to be here illegally."

All eight voting members of the Supreme Court upheld this provision, which requires
that Arizona cops try to determine the immigration status of individuals who have been stopped for reasons not involving immigration.

Please note the difference between what the president is quoted as saying and what Saunders correctly reports the S.B. 1070 provision as requiring.  The law requires "that Arizona cops try to determine the immigration status of individuals who have been stopped for reasons not involving immigration." President Obama of course knows this.  So Obama lied in his statement when he said that "the Arizona law that requires local law enforcement officials to check the immigration status of anyone they even suspect to be here illegally."

Obama's egregious misrepresentation has been repeated time and again by leftists over the last two years.  See my 1 June 2010 post, The Misrepresentations of Arizona S. B. 1070 Continue.  Other
of my 1070 posts are to be found in the Arizona category.

Why are leftists so mendacious?  Because in their scheme the glorious end justifies the scurrilous means.

Don't forget to read the rest of Saunders' article.

Why are People So Easy to Swindle?

People are so easy to swindle because the swindler has as accomplices the victim's own moral defects.  When good judgment and moral sense are suborned by lust or greed or sloth or vanity or anger, the one swindled participates willingly in his own undoing.  In the end he swindles himself.

How is it, for example, that Bernie Madoff 'made off' with so much loot?  You have  otherwise intelligent people who are lazy, greedy and vain: too lazy to do their own research and exercise due diligence, too greedy to be satisfied with the going rate of return, and too vain to think that anything bad can happen to such high-placed and sophisticated investors as themselves.

Or take the Enron employees.  They invested their 401 K money in the very firm that that paid their salaries!  Now how stupid is that?  But they weren't stupid; they stupified themselves by allowing the subornation of their good sense by their vices.

The older I get the more I appreciate that our problems, most of them and at bottom, are moral in nature.  Why, for example, are we and our government in dangerous debt?  A lack of money?  No, a lack of virtue.  People cannot curtail desire, defer gratification, be satisfied with what they have, control their lower natures, pursue truly choice-worthy ends.

Taqiyya, Tawriya, and Creative Lying

Here:

Perhaps you have heard of taqiyya, the Muslim doctrine that allows lying in certain circumstances, primarily when Muslim minorities live under infidel authority. Now meet tawriya, a doctrine that allows lying in virtually all circumstances—including to fellow Muslims and by swearing to Allah—provided the liar is creative enough to articulate his deceit in a way that is true to him.

[. . .]

As a doctrine, "double-entendre" best describes tawriya's function. According to past and present Muslim scholars (several documented below), tawriya is when a speaker says something that means one thing to the listener, though the speaker means something else, and his words technically support this alternate meaning.

For example, if someone declares "I don't have a penny in my pocket," most listeners will assume the speaker has no money on him—though he might have dollar bills, just literally no pennies. Likewise, say a friend asks you, "Do you know where Mike is?" You do, but prefer not to divulge. So you say "No, I don't know"—but you keep in mind another Mike, whose whereabouts you really do not know.

The Pinocchio 'Paradox'

This curious bagatelle is wending its way through the World Wide Web.  The cartoon is supposed to be paradoxical in some way.  The reader who brought it to my attention writes, "A friend and myself actually debated this at length over lunch, and I argued that at best it is a performative inconsistency.  I'm sure you have a more nuanced opinion on this silly meme!"   

Well, let's see.  The salient feature of Pinocchio is that his nose grows whenever he tells a lie.  From this one guesses that the paradox has something to do with lying.  Now a lie is not the same as a false statement; it is a false statement made with the intention to deceive  by someone who knows the truth.  (Or so I will assume for the space of this post.)  If this is what a lie is, then one cannot lie about matters that are not objectively the case and known to be such.  Suppose I predict that tomorrow morning, at 6 AM, my blood pressure will be 125/75, but my prediction turns out false: my blood pressure the next morning is 135/85.  No one who heard my prediction could claim that I lied when I made it even if I had the intention of deceiving my hearers.  For although I made (what turned out to be) a false statement with the intention to deceive, I had no way of knowing exactly what my blood pressure would be the next day. 

Similarly with 'My nose will grow now.'  This  sentence does not express an intention on Pinocchio's part to bring about a nose lengthening by the power of his will since presumably he never has such an intention.  The sentence is a future tense sentence which predicts what is about to happen.  'Now' does not refer to the time of utterance, but to a time right after it.  (If you argue that the presence of 'now' renders the sentence present tense, then the sentence is incoherent, and the 'paradox' cannot get off the ground.) 

It follows that Pinocchio cannot be lying.  Assuming the Law of Excluded Middle and Bivalence, what he says is either true or false.  Either way, no paradox arises that I can see.

But suppose Pinnochio utters the present tense sentence, 'My nose grows now' or 'My nose is growing now.'  Does this issue in paradox?

If  Pinocchio says 'My nose  grows now,' he is either lying or not.   If he is lying, then he is making a false statement, which implies that his nose does not grow now.  If he is not lying, then his statement is either true or false, which implies that either his nose does grow now or his nose does not grow now.  Therefore, either his nose does not grow now or his nose does grow now.  But that is wholly unproblematic. 

Therefore I fail to find any paradox here if a paradox is either a logical consistency or a performative inconsistency. 

What am I missing?  There is a 2010 Analysis article under this rubric.  But I don't have access to it at the moment, and I'm not sure the topic is exactly the same.

On Exaggeration

Why do people exaggerate in serious contexts? The logically prior question is: What is exaggeration, and how does it differ from lying, bullshitting, and metaphorical uses of language? A physician in a radio broadcast the other morning said, "You can't be too thin, too rich, or have too low a cholesterol level."

Note first that the medico was not joking but making a serious point. But he couched this serious point in a sentence which is plainly false. Since he had no intention of deceiving his audience, and since the point he was making (not merely trying to make) about cholesterol is true, he was not lying. He was not bullshitting either since he was not trying to misrepresent himself as knowing something he does not know or more than he knows.

Exaggeration bears some resemblance to metaphor. If I say, 'Sally is a block of ice,' I speak metaphorically or figuratively. What I say is literally false. But by saying it, I manage to convey to the listener some such proposition as that Sally is unemotional and (perhaps) sexually unresponsive. And when the sawbones exaggerated, though he said something literally false, he managed to convey to his audience the true proposition that total cholesterol levels for most of us need reducing.

But I wouldn't want to say that the good doctor was speaking metaphorically. I am merely pointing to a similarity between metaphor and exaggeration. The similarity may consist in the coming apart of sentence meaning and speaker's meaning. In both examples, the sentence meaning is that of a falsehood. The speaker, however, using those literally false sentences means something different from what the words 'by themselves' mean, and manages to convey truths to his hearers.

So I suggest that to understand exaggeration we need to understand metaphor so that we can delimit the former from the latter. But what exactly is metaphor? That's a tough one.   Here I catalog three specimens of exaggeration by well-known philosophers.

The Tendency to Exaggerate

Not content to say what is true, people exaggerate thereby turning the true into the false. Three examples from sober philosophers.

Martin Buber, who is certainly no Frenchman, writes that “a melody is not composed of tones, nor a verse of words...” (I and Thou, p. 59) His point is that a melody cannot be reduced to its individual notes, nor a verse to its constituent words. But he expresses this truth in a way that makes it absurdly false. A melody without tones would be no melody at all. The litterateur exaggerates for literary effect, but Buber is no mere litterateur. So what is going on?

For a second example, consider Martin Heidegger. Somewhere in Sein und Zeit he writes that Das Dasein ist nie vorhanden. The human being is never present-at-hand. This is obviously false in that the human being has a body which is present-at-hand in nature as surely as any animal or stone. What he is driving at is the truth -- or at least the plausibility -- that the human being enjoys a special mode of Being, Existenz, that is radically unlike the Vorhandenheit of the mere thing in nature and the Zuhandenheit of the tool. So why doesn’t he speak the truth, and nothing but the truth, without exaggerating?

And then there is Ludwig Wittgenstein, who, according to J. N. Findlay, “took every wrong turn a philosopher can take.” (Personal communication) Wittgenstein’s fideism involves such absurd exaggerations as that religions imply no theoretical views. But when a Christian, reciting the Nicene creed, says “I believe in God the Father, almighty creator of heaven and earth...” he commits himself thereby to the metaphysical view that heaven and earth have a certain ontological status, namely, that of being creatures.

Of course, the Christian is doing more than this: his ‘I believe’ expresses trust in God as a person and not mere belief that certain propositions are true. But to deny that there is any propositional content to his belief would be ludicrous. And yet that appears to be what Wittgenstein is doing.

Bullshitting and Lying

What is it to bullshit?  Perhaps the best way to understand bullshitting is by comparing it to lying. So what is it to lie? The first thing to understand is that a lie is not the same as a false statement. Suppose I make a statement about something but my statement turns out to be false. It does not follow that I have lied. Suppose a latter-day Rip van Winkle wakes up from a long nap and, asked about the Dodgers, says, "They are a baseball team from Brooklyn." Has our man lied? Not at all. He simply hasn't kept up with 'recent' developments.

For a statement to count as a lie two conditions must be satisfied: (a) the statement must be false; (b) the statement must be made with the intention to deceive. These conditions are individually necessary and jointly sufficient. But what if someone states what he believes to be false with the intention to deceive, but it turns out that what he states is true? Isn't that also a lie? Not by the definition I just gave. So it looks as if we are in the presence of two concepts of lying. The concept just defined is the narrower and more usual concept. The other, broader concept, results by the deletion of condition (a).