Today in my Linguistic Anthropology course, we discussed a question that I am sure we talked about in Semantics o so many years ago, but I could not remember it too well. Anyway, we were talking about lying and what it is. It was interesting because throughout my life I have always tried to lie as little as possible, except when absolutely necessary, and even then, I wanted to have an element of truth remain in place. So to start with, we tried to define what is a lie and initially we came up with this criterion...
- A statement that is false
but that was not quite enough so we added to that
- A statement that is false and that the speaker knows to be false.
but this was also not enough, because many genres that one would not consider immediately would fit into this category and they are not necessarily lies... like joking... so we then added the criterion
- A statement that is false and that the speaker knows to be false, and that the listener expects to be true.
Now, this is satisfactory to a great extent, but does that mean that since half truths contain none of these elements that they are not in some way lies? I don't think they are, that is why they are called half-truths, or omissions and have their own titles and not just the blanket term of 'lie', but most linguists would probably dispute me on those points. But there are so many murky categories with this subject such as the following: misconception, joking, fiction, subjunctive mood, sarcasm, generalisations, white lies, and the big one for me promises of concealment, and there are a huge amount of other things that would fit into this, but these are all I can think of off of the top of my head.
In essence, the frustrating thing is, that with my effort to tell nothing but absolute truth all the time, I would be completely restricted in regular language use... for example, if I told a joke like 'what's green and smells like pork... Kermit's finger', I know this is not true, because Miss Piggy is not actually a pig, and therefore could not smell like pork. Furthermore, I know that Kermit does not actually finger Miss Piggy, or have any kind of sexual intimacy with her in actuality, but I speak as if though these things happened all the same. Does this make me less than honest? Probably not, because I am only presenting a scenario in which all of these elements could exist and even though I talk about them in an indicative manner, it is assumed to be false both by me and my listener. All the same, these things are still very murky, though joking may be considered benign by all, what of white lies? They are technically lying by their very name, but what is the acceptability of telling them? I don't know the answer for this, but several years ago, they would not have been in the least bit tolerable to me.
One other thing that I am getting at is, if you lie to keep a promise, is it still bad? In other words, if someone tells me something and makes me promise not to tell anyone else... and then someone else comes into the picture and asks for the exact information I was expressly forbidden to talk about, how do I respond to that person? Do I tell the truth to them, and lie to the initial person... or do I lie to them, and thereby maintain my promise to the initial person? If I say something like, "I can't comment on this" and this in turn, would only confirm what the second person was getting at, is that also a violation of the promise to the first person? Does saying "I don't know" make it an excusable lie, even though they do know, but they do not have to directly refute the truth of the actual question? Recently, I was in such a conundrum and said "I don't know", even though I did... was this the better course to take? I really am not sure about the answer to that, but I do know that I think I made the right decision there.