4 ms·

Do you know the difference between a lie and a falsehood? I think it does a lot of damage in the world, people labelling things as lies when they merely think

Do you know the difference between a lie and a falsehood? I think it does a lot of damage in the world, people labelling things as lies when they merely think they're not true. It's very inflammatory. "That's a lie!" says not only "That's not true" but "and you know it". Which often is itself not true. Thus you could be accused of lying yourself. Very often people are lied to in the media[0], then adopt false beliefs, which they then repeat - but they're not lying when they do so, they believe these things. It poisons communication when this word 'lies' is thrown around loosely. People disagree about a lot of things. It usually doesn't mean they're lying about it. Usually you have no idea whether people you don't know are lying or saying false things they believe. How could you know that with certainty. It's not even possible for a sentence to be a lie, in the way you seem to believe. A sentence uttered by a person, yes, but detach it as you did from any speaker, and it can only be true or false. A lie requires specific knowledge in the mind of the particular person uttering the sentence. [0]Whoops - see, I even did it myself. I don't know if that's right.

mikeash 8y ago
The converse is also true: it’s extremely dangerous to avoid the word “lie” when it actually fits. A certain nameless American president constantly gets a free pass on this from news organizations.
omegaworks 8y ago
>A lie requires specific knowledge in the mind of the particular person uttering the sentence. Can you clarify? Are you saying it is impossible to ascertain the intent of the speaker? I appreciate the distinction you are making, it is an important one. To lie is to speak a false statement, coupled with the intent to deceive. What is missing from your assertion is whether we can gage intent and how we do so. Intent is critical to understanding the degree to which we apply a corrective measure. It's the difference between manslaughter and murder.
- yesenadam 8y ago
  Are you saying it is impossible to ascertain the intent of the speaker? No, not at all. Just that for something to be a lie it needs 1. to be not true, and 2. for the person uttering it to know that it's not true. Hopefully that's entirely uncontroversial. Yes, how to find out what people know, desire, plan, intend etc is another question entirely. Another thing - I don't think you can always neatly divide people's utterances into something they know/believe vs something they don't. e.g. believing in god or not - some have varying levels of belief, depends on mood, some aren't sure what they believe etc, it's often not a simple, unchanging binary 'on or off' situation.
didibus 8y ago
What's the use you see for the distinction? In practicality?
- ben_w 8y ago
  Not parent poster, but I agree with them. A liar does so deliberately and will mix truth with fiction for the goal of manipulation. Everyone will believe and repeat at least one falsehood, we just don’t know what our own false beliefs are. There is no attempt manipulate with falsehoods.
- yesenadam 8y ago
  Well, that's a strange question. It's mostly how people talk to each other - we don't ordinarily hear e.g. Teacher: What's 8+9? Tommy: Uh..11. Teacher: No, that's a lie! It seems that particularly in heated political contexts, people enjoy calling false statements lies, and don't notice or care that what they're themselves saying isn't true. The end justifies the means, anything that scores points in the fight is good, even the same or worse than what you're accusing the other guy of doing.
  - didibus 8y ago
    But in the context of this article, I don't think it matters if people truly believe in the madness, or if they purposely put themselves behind it. You still end up with atrocities. Say Nazis weren't lied too, say all the way up, people really just had these false impressions. You make decisions that affect others, you're responsible for them. If you made a mistake, used falsehoods as your basis for the decisions, and did atrocious things, or, you did them willingly, I don't know. They're both bad. If thinking it's a lie pushes you to validate the truthfulness of your knowledge, then so be it. Even if you weren't lied to. It's all about that constant active search for the truth, and a certain amount of challenging what you hear, criticizing the so called facts, and looking a little harder. Tommy should know better. If he goes on living with that false belief of numbers, he's a threat to society. He'll make wrong choices, miscalculation, and his judgment can't be trusted. The same as if he was a liar. We should teach people this responsibility. You have to put in the effort to rid yourself of falsehoods and be a truth seeker. Also, most people should be able to judge their confidence in their knowledge. A lot of people end up doing things even though if they spent a few minutes thinking about it, they would know that they're not sure about this. Yet they do it anyway. That's getting pretty close to a lie.
philwelch 8y ago
Malicious lies can very, very, very quickly turn into innocent falsehoods spread by the ignorant and credulous. Which is perhaps closely related to the fact that more large-scale evil is done through obedience to authority than through malice itself. For every psychotic true-believer Nazi or Communist, there were thousands of ordinary people, just like you and me, who didn't want to rock the boat, let other people serve as their conscience, and quietly did as they were told.

mikeash 8y ago

The converse is also true: it’s extremely dangerous to avoid the word “lie” when it actually fits. A certain nameless American president constantly gets a free pass on this from news organizations.

omegaworks 8y ago

>A lie requires specific knowledge in the mind of the particular person uttering the sentence. Can you clarify? Are you saying it is impossible to ascertain the intent of the speaker? I appreciate the distinction you are making, it is an important one. To lie is to speak a false statement, coupled with the intent to deceive. What is missing from your assertion is whether we can gage intent and how we do so. Intent is critical to understanding the degree to which we apply a corrective measure. It's the difference between manslaughter and murder.

yesenadam 8y ago
Are you saying it is impossible to ascertain the intent of the speaker? No, not at all. Just that for something to be a lie it needs 1. to be not true, and 2. for the person uttering it to know that it's not true. Hopefully that's entirely uncontroversial. Yes, how to find out what people know, desire, plan, intend etc is another question entirely. Another thing - I don't think you can always neatly divide people's utterances into something they know/believe vs something they don't. e.g. believing in god or not - some have varying levels of belief, depends on mood, some aren't sure what they believe etc, it's often not a simple, unchanging binary 'on or off' situation.

didibus 8y ago

What's the use you see for the distinction? In practicality?

ben_w 8y ago
Not parent poster, but I agree with them. A liar does so deliberately and will mix truth with fiction for the goal of manipulation. Everyone will believe and repeat at least one falsehood, we just don’t know what our own false beliefs are. There is no attempt manipulate with falsehoods.
yesenadam 8y ago
Well, that's a strange question. It's mostly how people talk to each other - we don't ordinarily hear e.g. Teacher: What's 8+9? Tommy: Uh..11. Teacher: No, that's a lie! It seems that particularly in heated political contexts, people enjoy calling false statements lies, and don't notice or care that what they're themselves saying isn't true. The end justifies the means, anything that scores points in the fight is good, even the same or worse than what you're accusing the other guy of doing.
- didibus 8y ago
  But in the context of this article, I don't think it matters if people truly believe in the madness, or if they purposely put themselves behind it. You still end up with atrocities. Say Nazis weren't lied too, say all the way up, people really just had these false impressions. You make decisions that affect others, you're responsible for them. If you made a mistake, used falsehoods as your basis for the decisions, and did atrocious things, or, you did them willingly, I don't know. They're both bad. If thinking it's a lie pushes you to validate the truthfulness of your knowledge, then so be it. Even if you weren't lied to. It's all about that constant active search for the truth, and a certain amount of challenging what you hear, criticizing the so called facts, and looking a little harder. Tommy should know better. If he goes on living with that false belief of numbers, he's a threat to society. He'll make wrong choices, miscalculation, and his judgment can't be trusted. The same as if he was a liar. We should teach people this responsibility. You have to put in the effort to rid yourself of falsehoods and be a truth seeker. Also, most people should be able to judge their confidence in their knowledge. A lot of people end up doing things even though if they spent a few minutes thinking about it, they would know that they're not sure about this. Yet they do it anyway. That's getting pretty close to a lie.

philwelch 8y ago

Malicious lies can very, very, very quickly turn into innocent falsehoods spread by the ignorant and credulous. Which is perhaps closely related to the fact that more large-scale evil is done through obedience to authority than through malice itself. For every psychotic true-believer Nazi or Communist, there were thousands of ordinary people, just like you and me, who didn't want to rock the boat, let other people serve as their conscience, and quietly did as they were told.