A colleague just asked me which dining halls were open. I pasted text from the Dining Services website into an email in response, without quotation marks or other indication of quotation. (In an academic context, the lack of quotation marks would make it plagiarism, but not in this very informal context.) The text I pasted into the email constituted assertions whose content I did not believe, simply because by the time I pasted it, I had forgotten what it said (I have no memory for times and the like). But I believed, maybe even knew, that the assertions were all true, and there was no dishonesty.
In a similar way, it is possible to assert something you know to be true, and yet be lying. Suppose I am writing my chair to convince him of some point of policy and I have an unscrupulous colleague who emails me a complex sentence that he says is false but will convince the chair. I trust the savvy of my unscrupulous colleague and paste the sentence into my email without bothering to read it. It turns out that my unscrupulous colleague was mistaken, and the sentence is true, and in fact it expresses a truth that I believe. I then send the email to the chair. In so doing, it seems that I lied to the chair, even though I asserted something which I knew to be the case.
One might think that this isn't lying. If it's not, it's something morally equivalent to it, and our category of "lying" is artificially constricted.
Alex:
ReplyDelete"Suppose I am writing my chair to convince him of some point of policy and I have an unscrupulous colleague who emails me a complex sentence that he says is false but will convince the chair. I trust the savvy of my unscrupulous colleague and paste the sentence into my email without bothering to read it. It turns out that my unscrupulous colleague was mistaken, and the sentence is true, and in fact it expresses a truth that I believe. I then send the email to the chair. In so doing, it seems that I lied to the chair, even though I asserted something which I knew to be the case.One might think that this isn't lying. If it's not, it's something morally equivalent to it, and our category of "lying" is artificially constricted."
About two years or so ago at Mass, Father Finley said in his homily: "God writes straight with crooked letters."
After Mass, I asked him "How crooked are those letters?"
He replied "As crooked as they can be."
To state the obvious, what seems to make for dis/honesty in asserting p is not whether you believe p but whether you believe p is true.
ReplyDeleteIt is probably necessary that if you believe p, you believe p is true, but the converse does not follow, since you might only have a singular term ("this block of text my colleague sent me", "The general theory of relativity") to identify p.
I am inclined to think, but not sure, that this would be a problem for deflationary theories of truth.
Pruss: In the first instance, of copying and pasting from the Dining information, you clearly believed that they would get their schedule right, and therefore believed in general that the content was true.
ReplyDeleteIn the second case, it seems to me that the intention to deceive is what is morally reprehensible. Also, (to use a simpler illustration) I think it is lying to take an envelope with what you believe to be a false message inside it and give it to someone with the intent to deceive them. Even if it turns out that the contents of the envelope were actually true, you nevertheless fulfilled the role of a liar to the best of your ability ;-). Besides, it seems to me that we are often incorrect about certain complicated matters (perhaps the details of the current state of quantum theory), and so we could tell someone something to intentionally mislead them (e.g. that the Copenhagen interpretation of QM had come back into vogue), and we would be lying, even if unbeknownst to us the Copenhagen interpretation DID come back into vogue (not likely, but...).
Of course, if the Copenhagen interpretation is true, then telling someone it was coming back into vogue might somehow cause it to do so! LOL.
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