{"id":8361,"date":"2013-11-15T11:49:53","date_gmt":"2013-11-15T11:49:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2013\/11\/15\/the-dictonary-definition-of-lying-again-hansons-counterexample\/"},"modified":"2013-11-15T11:49:53","modified_gmt":"2013-11-15T11:49:53","slug":"the-dictonary-definition-of-lying-again-hansons-counterexample","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2013\/11\/15\/the-dictonary-definition-of-lying-again-hansons-counterexample\/","title":{"rendered":"The Dictionary Definition of Lying Again: Hanson’s Counterexample"},"content":{"rendered":"

I dedicate this, and all subsequent posts on lying and the several senses of 'is,' to Bill Clinton and Barack Obama who, by their brazen mendacity, have inadvertently fueled the fires of logico-linguistic inquiry.<\/span><\/p>\n

………..<\/span><\/p>\n

Tony Hanson e-mails and I comment in blue:<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Tony_hanson\"<\/a>I hope things are well for you. Sorry for the haste of this message but time is a commodity of which lowly adjuncts have little.<\/span><\/p>\n

Your posts on lying are interesting. You hint at this in one of your posts but I have not seen anyone raise questions about whether a falsehood is a necessary condition for lying. Further evidence perhaps of the family resemblance approach:<\/span><\/p>\n

Shady, Bonnie and Clyde rob a bank. They stash the loot under the wood pile at the hideout. A few days later Clyde notices the money is gone. Shady and Bonnie, in a conspiracy to take the loot for themselves, bury it under the oak tree at the cemetery. Clyde drags Shady out of the house and demands to know where the money is. In an attempt to deceive Clyde, he says the money is buried under the bridge by the river. Clyde drags Shady down to the bridge and to Shady's chagrin there is the loot. (Bonnie had moved the loot from the oak tree to the bridge in attempt to have it for herself).<\/span><\/p>\n

So Shady's statement that the loot was at the bridge was true, though he did attempt to deceive. Did Shady lie or not?<\/span><\/p>\n

Is a false statement necessary [for a lie] or just the belief that a statement is false?<\/span><\/p>\n

BV:  Counterexamples to the dictionary definition similar to Hanson's were proposed by Monokroussos and Lupu in the discussion threads and are familiar from the literature.  Here is the dictionary definition (that I was defending):<\/span><\/p>\n

D1.  To lie =df<\/sub>  to make a false statement with the intention to deceive.<\/span><\/p>\n

Given the Shady example, I think we have three options:<\/span><\/p>\n

A. Take it as a clear case of lying and reject or revise the dictionary definition.<\/span>
B.  Hold fast to (D1) and maintain that Shady did not lie.<\/span>
C.  Maintain that there is no one univocal sense of 'lie' in English but rather a family of related senses at the center of which is the paradigmatic sense, a sense captured by (D1).<\/span><\/p>\n

Here is a revision:<\/span><\/p>\n

D2. To lie =df<\/sub>  to make an untruthful statement with the intention to deceive.<\/span><\/p>\n

An untruthful statement is one that is believed to be false by the maker of the statement and hence can be either true or false.<\/span><\/p>\n

Here is a problem with (D2).  Jones is under audit by the IRS.  The high number of personal exemptions he claimed flagged him for audit.  Jones, who has no children,  say to an IRS agent, intending to deceive him, "All of my children live at home."   Since Jones has no children, he does not believe it to be false or true that they live at home.   And yet Jones is presumably lying to the IRS agent.  (Example via Chisholm ia SEP article.)
<\/span><\/p>\n

But back to our metaphilosophical quandary.  I suspect that each of (A)-(C) leads to trouble, but (C) leads to less trouble.  Philosophers have proposed a number of definitions, see the SEP article<\/span><\/a> on lying and deception, but no consensus has been reached.  This does not prove that no consensus can be reached or that the quest for a definition must end in failure.  But it is pretty good evidence for this conclusion.<\/span><\/p>\n

As for the (B) approach, I could just insist that (D1) captures the essence of lying.  But lacking as I do special access to Plato's topos ouranos<\/em>, that insistence would smack of arbitrarity.<\/span><\/p>\n

So what exactly is wrong with the (C) approach?  Peter Lupu in conversation suggested that this leads to the abandoning of the ancient Platonic project  of seeking the natures of justice, knowledge, virtue, and so on.  But maybe not.  If some concepts are family-resemblance concepts, it doesn't follow that all are.  It could be that there are incorrect and correct (literal) uses of 'lies' and cognates, but that the correct uses are not unified by one univocal sense, but form a resemblance class.  Thus there would be no strict One to their Many.  But it would not follow that there are no strict ones-in-manys or ones-over-manys.<\/span><\/p>\n

Consider this list:<\/span><\/p>\n

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

How many words?  One or three?  Can't be both.  Make a distinction.  There are three tokens of the same type.  The type is a one-in-many.  We could also say that if each token is used in the (D1)-sense, there is exactly one sense common to all three uses. <\/span><\/p>\n

\nRelated articles<\/legend>\n
\n
\"\"<\/a>Obama as Bullshitter<\/a><\/div>\n
\"\"<\/a>On Misusing the Word 'Lie'<\/a><\/div>\n
\"\"<\/a>More on Lying<\/a><\/div>\n
\"\"<\/a>For a Lie to be a Lie, Must There be an Intention to Deceive?<\/a><\/div>\n
\"\"<\/a>Lying in the Age of Obama<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/fieldset>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I dedicate this, and all subsequent posts on lying and the several senses of 'is,' to Bill Clinton and Barack Obama who, by their brazen mendacity, have inadvertently fueled the fires of logico-linguistic inquiry. ……….. Tony Hanson e-mails and I comment in blue: I hope things are well for you. Sorry for the haste of … Continue reading “The Dictionary Definition of Lying Again: Hanson’s Counterexample”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,228,125],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8361","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-metaphilosophy","category-truth","category-truthfulness"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8361","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=8361"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8361\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8361"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8361"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8361"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}