Aristotle, Kant, and Grice on "White Lies"

by JLS
for the GC

THOSE WHO ATTENDED the workshop: Lying, Saying, and Meaning in Oslo were fascinated to learn of Grice on white lies, so called.

Although traditionally lying is defined as saying something you believe to be false with the intent to deceive, philosophers more recently agree that intending to deceive is not a necessary condition on lying.

This has prompted a number of alternative definitions, many of which attempt to define lying in terms of assertion.

These developments raise interesting question about lying in relation to the saying-meaning distinction.

In particular, questions arise as to how to define lying so as to account for intuitions regarding cases of irony, false implicature, joking, and various kinds of non-assertoric discourse.

It is due to Grice that we can bring together work on these hot issues.

Don Fallis (University of Arizona): Lying and Grice’s Maxims of Quality
Andreas Stokke (CSMN): Lying and Asserting
Elisabeth Camp (University of Pennsylvania): Figurative Language in Antagonistic Contexts: Deniability, Pedantry, and Lying
Jennifer Saul (University of Sheffield): Lying, Misleading and What is Said
Roy Sorensen (Washington University, St Louis): Lying with Conditionals


Abstracts

Elisabeth Camp

"Figurative Language in Antagonistic Contexts: Deniability, Pedantry, and Lying."

As Camp notes, debates about pragmatics and ‘what is said’ have typically focused on fully cooperative interchanges, that is, conversations where the speaker’s and hearer’s interests are fully aligned.

But often enough, speakers and hearers are only minimally cooperative.

They make contributions to the conversation that are relevant, but not maximally so.

Figurative language plays an especially interesting role in such antagonistic interactions.

Metaphor and sarcasm allow speakers to craft utterances that preserve deniability.

But they also permit hearers to insist on flat-footed, pedantic interpretations.

Recognizing the different ways in which speakers thread their way between explicit truth and outright lies, and the range of responses available by hearers, requires developing a more nuanced account of saying, meaning, and asserting.


Don Fallis, Lying and Grice’s Maxims of Quality

According to a standard philosophical definition, Fallis notes, you lie if you assert what you believe to be false with the intent to deceive. Recently, several philosophers such as Sorensen 2007, Fallis 2009 (if Fallis can self-quote) have claimed that there are lies that are not intended to deceive.

In order to count such bald-faced lies as lies, Fallis suggests that you lie if you say what you believe to be false when you believe that one of Grice’s conversational maxims (“Do not say what you believe to be false”) is in effect.

However, Fallis argues that this definition also fails.

First, it counts some statements that are clearly not lies as being lies.

Second, it counts some statements that are lies (and that uncontroversially counted as lies on the standard philosophical definition) as not being lies.

Even so, I suggest that there may yet be a correct definition of lying in the vicinity.


As Jennifer Saul, in Lying, Misleading and What is Said, notes, the term 'what is said', and other related terms, are currently being used in a huge variety of ways in philosophy of language.

They are the subject of many complicated, passionate, and seemingly endless debates.

One of the subjects of debate is how, and whether, our use of
these terms relates to that of ordinary speakers.

Are these debates merely a matter of theoreticians arguing about their theoretical vocabulary?

Is anything at stake here that ordinary speakers do, or should, care about?

The answers to these questions (and many others) seem at this point to be far from clear.

Not all the terms philosophers discuss are like this.

Take, for example, terms like 'lie' and 'mislead'.

The distinction between lying and misleading is an immensely natural one.

It is clearly not a mere philosophers' distinction, unfamiliar to ordinary life and of dubious significance.

It is a distinction that ordinary speakers draw extremely readily, and generally care about, and a distinction recognised and accorded great significance in some areas of the law.

Interestingly, it is also a distinction that turns on the notion of saying.

You cannot lie unless you deliberately say something false (or at least something you believe to be false).

Saul then goes to examine the relationship between
theoreticians' notions of saying (and the like) and the ordinary, intuitive distinction between lying and misleading.

Saul, typically, tries to argue that, despite the huge proliferation of conceptions of saying (and related notions) in the literature, none of these notions can capture the intuitions that we have about the lying/misleading distinction.

The main conclusion, for Saul, then, is that there is a problem to be solved.

In "Lying and asserting," Andreas Stokke defends a definition of lying according to which you lie when you assert what you believe to be false where assertion is understood in terms of the familiar account whereby an assertion is a proposal for adding information to a common ground.

Stokke argues that this definition of lying is able to handle problem cases involving irony, false implicature, humour, and fiction.

Further, the definition makes the right prediction for so-called bald-faced lies that present counterexamples to the traditional conception on which lying is a matter of saying something one believes to be false with the intent to deceive.

In "Lying with conditionals", Roy Sorensen notes: "If you read my abstract, you will, hopefully, understand what my paper is about."

Under what conditions would the preceding assertion be a lie?

Traditional definitions of lying are applied to straight declaratives such as

`The dog ate my homework’.

My negative thesis is that this one sided diet of examples leaves us unprepared for sentences in which conditional probability governs assertibility.

The absolute probability of a conditional is often trivially high by virtue of the improbability of the antecedent:

If the sun explodes tomorrow, the Oslo workshop will proceed as scheduling by candlelight’.

Sorensen's positive thesis is that the sincerity definition of lying (Lying = insincere assertion), extends informatively to conditionals.

For it signals the importance of tailoring sincerity conditions to type of assertion in question.

As those sincerity conditions emerge, we gain intriguing evidence that conditionals are not alone in having a sincerity condition governed by conditional probability.

J. L. Austin’s “verdictives” (such as the judge’s `Guilty’ and the umpire’s “Goal!”) are based on evidence and inference rules that are imposed on the verdict giver.

This imposition makes us reluctant to say judges are lying when they fail to believe their verdicts.

But this may fail short of showing that the judges are not lying.

The sincerity condition based on absolute probability is not always clearly trumped by the sincerity condition based on conditional probability. If neither clearly overrides the other, the judge may be impaled on a moral dilemma.


In the "All ye his Saints" episode of Bonanza, a little boy Michael hears the doctor say that only God help his father - who has been wounded in a gun accident clearing owls from his barn.

As night falls, Michael is comforted by the farmhand Elijah, an Indian Christian with lingering pagan superstitions. Elijah describes God as a strong man who lives all alone, high in the local mountain, somewhat careworn from all his responsibilities. The conversation makes a deep impression on Michael. Determined to save his father, Michael slips away during the night and rides a mule up the mountain. There Michael meets an old, white bearded man Tom Caine. Michael mistakes him as God. Caine is actually a fugitive mountaineer; he had been condemned for leading a raid against an Indian village that targeted Indian children. Michael asks "God" to spare his father's life. Caine tells Michael that he is not God. But the boy thinks God is just testing his faith. Soon this pestering is eclipsed by a much bigger problem for Caine; a rescue party for boy has come into view. One of the rescuers, Joe Cartwright, will not be scared off with rifle shots. Joe is injured in a heroic charge to save the Michael. Caine is now burdened by both Michael and Joe. Exasperated by the troubles Michael has brought upon him, the old mountaineer gets drunk. When Joe asks for a drink, the drunk Caine tells Michael that if he carries a filled cup to Joe without spilling a drop, his father will be alright. Michael carefully brings the cup. Joe is appalled. He angrily tells Caine to tell Michael he is lying. Caine denies he is lying; insisting that this is a test. Michael carries the cup without spill a drop. At the end of episode, we learn that his father indeed recovers.

Does this happy ending show that Caine was not lying?