Truthfulness – Page 6 – Maverick Philosopher

Taqiyya, Tawriya, and Creative Lying

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.

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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.

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?

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.

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