Suppose I say
1) Had Jeb Bush won the 2016 Republican nomination for president, Hillary Clinton would have won the presidential election.
We know, of course, that Donald J. Trump won the 2016 election. Suppose an Anti-Trumper calls me a liar for asserting (1). Have I lied? That depends on what a lie is.
What is a lie?
A lie is not the same as a false statement. For one can make a false statement without lying: one may sincerely believe that what one is asserting is true when in fact it is false. The intention to deceive is essential to a lie. No lie without the intention to deceive. A lie, then, is an intentional misrepresentation of what one either knows to be the case or sincerely believes to be the case for the purpose of deceiving one's audience.
Now what is the case is actually the case as opposed to possibly the case. So on the definition just given, one cannot lie about the merely possible. It follows that one cannot lie about what might have been or what could have been. Therefore, I cannot be fairly accused of telling a lie if I assert (1). There simply is no fact of the matter as to whether or not, had Jeb won the nomination, Hillary would or would not have won the election.
On my analysis, then, there are two necessary conditions for a statement's being a lie. (i) The statement must express a person's intention to deceive his interlocutor(s), and (ii) there must be some actual fact about which the one who lies intends to deceive them. Note that one who lies on a given occasion need not be a liar because a liar is one who habitually lies, and one who lies needn't be in the habit of lying.
Can one lie about a counterfactual state of affairs?
It follows from my analysis that there cannot be any lies pertaining to counterfactual states of affairs. Counterfactual conditionals, however, have as their subject matter counterfactual states of affairs, which is to say, states of affairs that are really possible but not actual. So no counterfactual is a lie. Note that I said really possible, not epistemically possible. I am assuming that Reality, with majuscule 'R,' is not exhausted by the actual or existent: there are merely possible states of affairs that subsist mind-independently. (That which subsists is but does not exist.)
But what I just wrote is not self-evident: I don't want to paper over the fact that the problem of the merely possible and its ontological status is deep and nasty and will lead us into a labyrinth of aporiai and insolubilia. More about this later.
Now (1) is either true or if not true, then false, but no one knows, or could know, 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). Consider a second example.
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 and could not know to be true. Again, there is no underlying fact of the matter.
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.
Before proceeding to a third example, let me record an aporetic pentad for later rumination and delectation:
1) Counterfactuals have truth-values: some are true and the rest are false.
2) The true ones are contingently true.
3) Contingent truths have truth-makers.
4) Truth-makers are obtaining, i.e., actual states of affairs.
5) Counterfactuals are about non-actual, merely possible, states of affairs.
These propositions are individually plausible but collectively inconsistent. Is the problem genuine or pseudo? If genuine, how solve it? Which proposition should we reject? I hope to come back to this problem later.
A third example. London Ed quotes and comments upon a recent assertion of mine:
“He [David Frum] neglects to observe, however, that the devastation of that country [Ukraine] would not have occurred had Trump been president.”
Ed comments:
Trump’s presidency ended January 20, 2021. The invasion of Ukraine was 24 February 2022. What might have happened (another counterfactual) under a continued Trumpian presidency that would have prevented Putin’s invasion? The build up of Russian troops began March and April 2021, although the Russian government repeatedly denied having plans to invade or attack.
What might have happened is that Putin would have been dissuaded from invading Ukraine out of fear of what Trump would do to him and his country should he have invaded.
Related: Counterfactuals and Hypothesis Testing in Political Science