Roy Sorensen

1
What Lies Behind Misspeaking

• Roy Sorensen
• Washington University in St. Louis

2
Standard Definition of Lying

• Lying is asserting
• with the intent to deceive

3
Standard Definition is too Narrow

• Brazen lies (Saddam Husseins minders)
• Forced assertions (Coerced confessions, Galileo)
• Lies aimed at knowledge rather than belief
• Lying to machines
• Lying for a polygraph operator so that he can
  establish a baseline for his lie detector
• Compulsive lying
• Lying to yourself

4
Insincerity Definition

• Lying is insincere assertion
• Insincerity is lack of belief, that is,
• Lying is asserting what you fail to believe
• to be true
• In Bald-Faced Lies I focused on the assertion
  component
• I now turn to the insincerity component

5
Insincerity Definition seems too Broad

• People sometimes assert p automatically without
  having any occurrent thought about p.
• People with incorrect theories of belief (such as
  the eliminativist Patricia Churchland) will deny
  they have any beliefs.
• People can be deluded about what they believe.
• People who misspeak assert what they do not
  believe but we distinguish lying from
  misspeaking.

6
Moses Illusion

• How many animals of each kind did Moses take on
  the ark?

7
General Strategy

• Decrease the attributions of lying by lowering
  the standard for sincerity.

8
Sincerity only requires Shallow Belief

• Deep belief is what would be said under ideal
  conditions in which the speaker is candid and
  free of performance error.
• Deep belief is central to prediction,
  explanation, and evaluation.
• Yet shallow belief is what is crucial in the
  attribution of lies!

9
Further Reasons for Surprise

• Sincerity seems like a virtue faithfully
  revealing a deep state of mind.
• Only deep beliefs confer reliability in testimony
  why track (often idiotic) shallow beliefs when
  evaluating assertions?

10
Epitomizing the Shallowness

• Kripkes Pierre Puzzle
• Pierres Deep Belief is Mysterious
• He sincerely assents to Londres est jolie
• He also sincerely assents to London is not
  pretty
• Despite being stumped as to what Pierre (deeply)
  believes, we easily answer the question Is
  Pierre lying? with No.
• And we easily answer the question Would he be
  lying if he gave the opposite answers? YES!

11
Perjury Illustration

• Bartlett Did you or did you not throw the
  watering can?
• Fitch I did not!
• Bartlett Yes or no?! Did you throw the watering
  can?
• Fitch No!
• Bartlett Answer the question!!!!
• Fitch I didn't throw it!

12
Judge not -- continued

• Bartlett So ... he denies it! ... Very well ...
  would you be surprised to hear that you'd thrown
  the watering can?
• A pause.
• Fitch ... Yes.
• Bartlett And do you deny not throwing the
  watering can?
• Fitch Yes.
• Bartlett (triumphantly) Ha!!!

13
Need to modify perjury definition

• Fitch first denies throwing the watering can and
  then denies not throwing the watering can.
• He meets the legal definition of perjury Fitch
  gave relevant testimony he knew to be false.
• Excluding misspoken testimony would yield an
  overly narrow definition of perjury
• Proposal Confine perjury to insincere testimony
• This revision has the further advantage of
  cohering with the long held belief (widely shared
  across diverse cultures) that lying is correlated
  with internal states such as nervousness and
  guilty knowledge

14
Second challenge Incomprehension

• Speakers will sometime assert p when it is common
  knowledge that they do not understand p
• Dull classmate reports Desargues' theorem to
  smart student who missed class In a projective
  space, two triangles are in perspective axially
  if and only if they are in perspective
  centrally.
• Liked baffled students, religious people often
  assert propositions that they know they do not
  understand.

15
Solution Another Dimension of Superficiality

• Sincere assertion only requires belief in true,
  not belief simpliciter.
• Lying is asserting what you do not believe to be
  true
• Research on indexical sentences such as It is
  quiet here now show that the speaker does not
  need need to know which proposition is being
  asserted.
• David Kaplans kidnapped heiress

16
Lessons from the second dimension

• Sincerity is meta-linguistic
• Aim of assertion is to spread knowledge, a goal
  that does not require that the speaker know that
  p, only that he know that p is true.
• Truth sets us free, liberating assertion from the
  boundaries of understanding.

17
Intermediates between Shallow and Deep

• Shallow beliefs are at one pole of a continuum.
• Shallow beliefs look deeper when the speaker
  refuses to disavow
• Conflict cases arise when merely asking the
  question will make the subject correct his slip
  and yet the shallow belief controls much
  behavior as when traveler overlooks time
  change.
• Shallow beliefs can gradually take root and
  become deep beliefs Obama on the Auschwitz and
  Buchenwald

18
Referential-Attributive

• Does Barack Obama believe that there is a
  president of Canada when he says he will
  renegotiate NAFTA with the president of Canada?
• Or is he misspeaking?
• Like most Americans, he frequently mis-describes
  the prime minister of Canada as the president of
  Canada.

19
Depth Charge Sentences

• Depth charge sentences show that misspeakers
  sometimes refuse to disavow.
• Physician No head injury is too trivial to be
  ignored
• Physician and patient both interpret this as
  However trivial a head injury is, it should not
  be ignored.
• But it means the opposite However trivial a head
  injury is, it should be ignored.
• Same syntax as No missile is too small to be
  banned.

20
A Matter of Degree

• Shallow beliefs are at one end of a continuum.
• We vary how finely we filter out performance
  error.
• There is a magnetic pull toward Socrates
  hyper-rationalism in Platos dialogue Gorgias
  because deep beliefs seem to do all the
  explaining.
• The role of shallow beliefs in attributing lying
  reveals some pull in the opposite direction.
• Automaticity of speech provides rationale for
  moderating rationalizing tendency

21
Lying without Deception

• The insincerity definition brings out relevance
  of linguistics and philosophy of language.
• It illuminates misspeaking rather than being
  defeated by it.
• And dropping the intent to deceive clause helps
  us recognize more kinds of lies.