{"id":4113,"date":"2018-11-08T13:50:03","date_gmt":"2018-11-08T13:50:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2018\/11\/08\/lies-and-counterfactuals\/"},"modified":"2018-11-08T13:50:03","modified_gmt":"2018-11-08T13:50:03","slug":"lies-and-counterfactuals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2018\/11\/08\/lies-and-counterfactuals\/","title":{"rendered":"LIes and Counterfactuals"},"content":{"rendered":"

Suppose I say<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

1) Had Jeb Bush won the 2016 Republican  nomination, Hillary Clinton would have won the presidential election.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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).  <\/span><\/p>\n

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).<\/span><\/p>\n

Donald Trump famously boasted, <\/span><\/p>\n

\n

2) Had it not been for all the illegal votes, I would have won the popular vote as well as the electoral college vote.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/span><\/p>\n

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.<\/span><\/p>\n

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.<\/span> <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading “LIes and Counterfactuals”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[421,125],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4113","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-counterfactuals","category-truthfulness"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4113","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4113"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4113\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}