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Big news! I was recently awarded a second grant from Emergent Ventures, part of which is so I can write some papers—and then, eventually, a book—in defence of lying to children about Santa Claus.
To sharpen my conceptual beak, I’ve been dipping into the philosophical literature on lying—specifically, the definition of lying. Without rhyme or reason, here are some nuggets of pedantry I’ve found titillating:
It’s tempting to think lying always involves an intent to deceive. The view that liars always intend to deceive is called deceptionism. I used to tacitly believe deceptionism—heck, it’s endorsed by Merriam Webster. But in these enlightened days, I doubt whether it can handle cases of people lying to machines. When I use hotel/student accommodation Wi-Fi, I falsely enter my name as Tom Wambsgans, my favourite character from Succession. Since I’m pretty sure the staff don’t look at who connects, and I know the website isn’t self-aware (👀), I don’t think I intend to deceive it1. Still, I’m intuitively disposed to call what I’m doing a lie. Deceptionism debunked?
Another tough case for deceptionism. Suppose I watch you commit a crime (the crime of not subscribing to my blog). Both the crime—and my witnessing it—are caught on camera, and the tape is played to the jury. I know you have a lifelong vendetta against snitches, and will have one of your boys kill me if I corroborate the footage. When the prosecutor asks me: “Did you see [embarrassing Substack username] commit the crime?”, I say “No, I saw it not!”. I don’t intend to deceive anyone by saying this. Everyone knows you committed the crime and everyone knows I witnessed it. My lie is motivated entirely by self-preservation—I’d prefer a perjury charge to assassination. Deception, should it occur, would be an accidental by-product.
A question I’m pretty torn on is whether lies are—by definition—false. In “The Definition of Lying”, Thomas Carson reports the linguistic intuition that lies are always false. “Showing that a statement is true”, he writes, “is always sufficient to counter the accusation that one has told a lie”. Even if I believe what I’m saying is false, the thought goes, it’s not really lying if it’s true—it’s just a failed attempt at lying. I feel a slight pull in this direction, but mostly I lean the other way. Suppose I catch a humungous fish, mistake it for a tiny fish, and accidently let it wriggle free into the water. I go home, plaster on a grin, and tell everyone the fish I caught was humungous. In this case, I’m intuitively disposed to say I’ve actually lied, not just attempted to lie. Others—like Carson—disagree: “My linguistic intuitions tell me that a lie must be a false statement, and that, therefore, what I say in this case is not a lie. I intend to lie in this case but I don’t.” Given the diversity of intuitions, and the fuzziness of most concepts, I’m inclined to say that this is just one of those cases where there’s no determinate answer to whether lies have to be false to count as lies.
Can agnostics tell lies? An agnostic is someone who suspends judgement on the truth of a proposition. (For example, when I was agnostic about whether God exists—before I encountered the flabbergasting compelling argument from psychophysical harmony—I suspended judgement on the proposition “God exists”. I doubted God’s existence, but never denied it.) Suppose I’m agnostic about whether vaccines cause elbow cancer, but say, to impress a group of my right-wing friends, “Vaccines cause elbow cancer—hundreds die each year!”. Have I told a lie? Maybe. But not, I think, about vaccines. To have lied about vaccines, I’d need to have positively believed that vaccines are elbow-cancer safe. What you lied about, rather, was my belief on the topic of vaccines and elbow cancer. Belief is the norm of assertion. In normal circumstances, when you assert X, you don’t need to qualify it with “I believe X”. Belief is implied; adding “I believe…” to the assertation is redundant. So when I assert, to my right-wing friends, “Vaccines cause elbow cancer—hundreds die each year!”, I may as well be saying “Vaccines cause elbow cancer—hundreds die each year! And amen to what I just said.” Since that misrepresents my belief, I’m lying.2
This isn’t specific to the lying question per se, but in “What Is Lying?”, Don Fallis makes an excellent observation about the unbelievably annoying way “What is X?” philosophy papers are structured. In lieu of venting, I’ll quote Fallis at length: “There is an informal tradition in the conceptual analysis literature of sneaking up on the official definition of some concept. That is, one starts with an obvious candidate definition, says why it won’t quite work, tweaks the definition, says why it still won’t work, tweaks the definition again, etc. By the time the reader reaches the official definition, she is often dizzy enough to capitulate.” Like, why not just lead with the definition and explain yourself after? These people should go to jail.
If anyone knows the true definition of lying, feel free to share it in the comments!
From the SEP article on “The Definition of Lying and Deception”: “According to the addressee condition [on lying], lying necessarily involves addressing someone whom you believe to be a person capable of understanding your statement and forming beliefs on that basis. It is not possible to lie to those whom you believe to be non-persons (goldfish, dogs, robots, etc.)”
Epistemic status: uncertain. Do let me know if I’m wrong about this!
This strikes me as a good example of where a pragmatist-flavored wariness about being drawn into verbal disputes would be salutary. We can stipulate definitions that settle these questions and then ask pragmatic questions about which definitions should be used for which purposes. That strikes me as a more fruitful approach than assuming there's anything all that special about how English speakers limn the boundaries of "lying".
Congrats on the grant - I love the idea of a book in defence of lying to children about Santa. After reading this post, my feeling is that how we've approached it isn't based on an intent to deceive, but to allow our kids an opportunity to learn some critical thinking skills. My daughter is right at the age where she's unsure and asking questions, so we're getting into some interesting conversations about it all.