I should possibly see this film. Kramer has commented on it in Re: Free for lunch.
Indeed, in a word without 'lying' the idea of 'truth' seems otiose, too. I'm not THAT sure, though. Because there is the concept of 'false' that somehow fits in between.
False can be some 'p', where no 'intention' really is operative.
So, one can LIE by telling the truth -- providing what one tells is what one THINKS is false. If it comes out, by accident, to be 'true', then while one IS lying (because one is saying what one thinks is not true) one is still saying what IS true.
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Honesty is the best policy, and the point about how 'wrong' lying is is interesting, as I see it reported by Kramer re: "The Invention of Lying".
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In the Romance languages, 'mentire' (to lie) is not too exorbitantly different from 'mentare', to mean. I'm never sure why such a connection. It seems as if 'to lie' (mentire) and 'to mean' (mentare) are in the opposite extremes, but hey.
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Grice is clear about this in "Ways of Words". He writes:
"It is much easier, for example, to tell the truth than to invent lies"
(WoW, p. 29).
Of course I'm not sure. Grice's point is 'phylogenetical', or 'ontogenetical' rather. Why do babies lie? When do they START lying.
If a baby wants to pee, he pees. There is no lying about it. Once there is some sort of control over things, a baby can lie.
"Are you hungry?"
"No, I'm not" -- when Baby IS hungry (a lie).
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It would seem then, that, in primitive (or very young) creatures, they cannot lie. As Sir John Lyons says, 'prevarication' is the signal of language (bees cannot lie as they dance). The absence of 'lying' at the point is 'causal' factive.
"p" ENTAILS 'p'.
If Baby blushes, it means Baby is embarrassed. (You cannot feign, ceteris paribus, a blush).
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So, when is LYING 'instituted'?
This is Grice"
Why do we not lie?
"A DULL but, no doubt at a certain level, adequate
answer is that it is just a well-recognised
empirical fact that people [do tell the truth]. They
learned to do so in childhood and have not lost
the habit of doing so; and indeed, it would involve
a good deal of effort to make a radical departure
from the habit. It is much easier, for example, to
tell the truth than to invent lies."
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Grice is unnecessarily (for our purposes) emphatic when he says, "invent" lies. I'm interested in
"p" "~p"
p is the case
p is not the case.
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"Are you hungry?"
Yes.
No.
"No" may be a lie -- but it's not much of an invention. Or a big invention.
In a way, it's like IRONY.
"Are you a virgin? (to a well-known prostitute).
"Yes!" (ironically, meaning, NO).
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Not a lot of invention of irony, there.
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So, one has to be careful.
In the case of the "Invention of Lying", qua film, I wouldn't know. I wouldn't know how to draw the boundary between immoral and moral cases of lying. In the old days, they used to speak of 'white' lies -- -- which of course Kant opposed.
Grice refers to the absolute prohibition (on the part of Kant) on lying in "Aspects of Reason", and he (Grice) seems NOT to agree with it.
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Leech quotes an adage, "Honesty is the best policy, says I", but I would need to find the source.
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The fact that Grice speaks of this under "Qualitas" can only confuse. Truth is NOT at the level of 'quantity' of information. Qualitas, as used by Kant, and Aristotle, referred to 'affirmatio' or 'negatio'. But Grice is trying to be witty and wants to have a special category for this type of level of requirement about our conversational moves. "The category of quality".
When I generalised the categories -- for my PhD, etc -- I used 'trustworthiness', rather than truth. I wanted to generalise to conversational moves which are NOT assertive -- such as:
"Give it to me!"
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The move, "give it to me" (the ball, as they are playing volley, say) is TRUSTWORTHY if the utterer desires what his or her conversational move 'means' --. I wouldn't say that "Give it to me!" is FALSE if the utterer does not want 'it' be given to the utterer. So we need to generalise.
Luckily, trust and truth ARE cognate, so it's not much of a divergence.
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I would not use "tell the truth" to describe and accidentally accurate account. One may "speak the truth" inadvertently, but, in idiomatic English, one "tells the truth" only when one says what one correctly believes is so in a case where lying is an option.
ReplyDeleteCompare:
Q. What did you tell them?
A. I told them what happened.
Q. What did you tell them?
A. I told the truth.
In the second version, there is an implicature that U might have chosen to lie (to serve a purpose that U and A understand) but chose not to lie. That same implicature might arise in context where the question implies that the asker wonders whether U told the truth, and in such a case "I told them what happened" is a perhaps meiotic version of "I told the truth against my/your/our interest." But if there is no such implicature in the question, there is no correlative implicature in answering "I told them what happened." In contrast, the question that prompts "I told the truth" almost always implicates "Did you tell the truth against your/my/our interest?" which is why the answer always implicates "against my/your/our interest," i.e., that the context was one in which lying might make sense.