Jonathan Webber on Deceiving With Words

This is Philosophy Bites with me Nigel Warburton and me David Edmonds. Philosophy Bites is unfunded. Please help us keep it going by subscribing or donating at www.flosfeedbites.com or you can become a patron at Patreon. I have a friend who once wrote a newspaper article and the byline gave a plug to what was described as his latest book. I was amused because whilst the book they mentioned was indeed his latest book, it was also his only book. Using the phrase his latest book implied surely that he had written at least two. The formulation of the byline wasn't exactly a lie but it seemed a bit disingenuous, a bit misleading. Was this as bad as lying? To give us the unvanished truth about the subtle moral grades of deception, here's Jonathan Weber. Jonathan Weber, welcome to Philosophy Bites. Hello. The topic we're going to focus on is deception with words. Now the most obvious way to deceive somebody with words is to tell a lie. So just in simple terms what is a lie? A lie is when you say something which the literal meaning of the words that you say is something that you believe not to be true and usually you have the intention that the other person will end up believing that falsehood. So we've got a window next to us. Just imagine the window was broken and there's a boy outside who said did you break that window and the boy says no I didn't when he did that's a straightforward lie. That's right. It's a straightforward lie because the literal meaning of what he said is that he didn't break the window and he knows that not to be true. But that's not the only way that he could be deceiving us. So if instead of asking that question you asked do you know who broke the window? Let's say he does know who broke the window but it wasn't him. He wasn't actually there when it happened. He could reply by saying I wasn't here when the window was broken. So what's going on there? He says I wasn't there when the window was broken. It's true that he wasn't there when the window was broken. So how am I being deceived? Because he does know who broke it and if you ask do you know who broke the window and he says I wasn't here when it was broken he seems to imply that the answer is no. In fact if you've got no particular reason to be suspicious of him at this time that's the belief you're going to form and that's how he can deceive you without lying. And it's deception particularly when it's intended. So there's a sense that he's answered in the way that he did in order to deflect you away from the culprit and from the information you might otherwise get out of him. That's right. Yeah so he's essentially being evasive. He's refusing to give you the information you're asking for but he's doing it without explicitly telling you that he's refusing to give you that information. In fact he's letting you think that he's given you as informative an answer as he can. So how does that work from a philosophical point of view? What are we talking about here in the philosophy of language? What is the process by which he's achieved this? So the important concept here is the idea of conversational implicature. Sentences convey a lot of meanings over and above the meanings that are literally contained. And that's an important structure of language. Without it we would find it very difficult to communicate if we were able to communicate at all. We would have to spell out absolutely everything that we meant to put across literally. So conversational implicature is a meaning that an utterance gets from its place within the conversation. Conversations are governed by certain norms and they're essentially governed by the assumption of cooperation. That the person you're talking to is cooperating with you in furthering the ends of that conversation, whatever those ends are. So in our example it's quite clear that the end of the conversation, the goal of the conversation is to establish a certain fact. The person asking the question wants some information and they want the information about how the window got broken and who broke it. And on the assumption of cooperation that means that the person asking the question is assuming, although not explicitly, they're not thinking in these terms necessarily, but they're assuming that the person they're talking to is collaborating with them in that conversation and as a result they're assuming that the person is giving the most informative answer that they can give. So if the person says, "I wasn't here at the time," if that's the most informative answer they can give, then it follows that they don't know who broke the window. But if they do know who broke the window, then the most informative answer they can give is, "Yes, I do. It was Nigel." And you might reasonably think that what he's doing there, as well as intentionally misleading you, is deliberately avoiding lying because he's been told that lying is a very bad thing to do. That's right. Yeah, and you see this in other contexts too, famously, politicians tend to exploit the implications of their sentences in order to avoid questions, in order to avoid giving you information that they don't want to give you, or perhaps even to lead you to believe something that they know not to be true. So from a moral point of view, which is worse, telling a phrase in a lie, or deliberately deceiving somebody by exploiting conversational implicatures? So there's some debate about this. I think that lying is worse. Well, more precisely, I think that we ought to have the attitude that lying is worse. So we ought to treat liars more harshly than we treat people when we catch them misleading us. And we are ourselves, if you feel the need to deceive somebody and you're going to deceive somebody, you should prefer to do it by misleading them than by lying. I think the difference is that lying does more damage to your credibility than misleading does. The way we work as human beings, as a community of people, is that we exchange information all the time. That's one important part of the way we work. And in order to do that, we need to be able to rely on each other as informants. So we need one another to be credible. I need to be able to believe what you say, and you need to be able to believe what I say. And that, I think, is the root of the moral concern with lies and deception generally, is not just the intentions of the deceiver, or the concern that they're manipulating the hearer, or the concern that their misinformation kind of have bad consequences down the line. I think the core issue is that when you deceive somebody, you damage your own status as an informant. Your own credibility as a member in the community of information, giving information, exchanging people, and it's in all of our interests that you don't damage that credibility. And that's why it's in all of our interests that we do what we can to stop you damaging your own credibility. And one of the ways we do that is by having a moral taboo on deception generally. But I also think that what we do have is a moral taboo on lying that is stronger than the moral taboo on misleading. I'm not completely convinced about this because I think most of us tell a large number of lies every day. Like if somebody comes up to me in the street and says, "Where is the hospital?" I'm not going to lie to them. But if somebody comes up to me in the street and says, "Does this shirt suit me?" I might lie to them, or if somebody says, "How are you today?" And I'm feeling really rough. I don't necessarily say I'm feeling really rough. I say, "I'm fine, thank you." Whether or not we actually disapprove strongly of a particular lie, does depend on our assessment of how important that lie is. How important was it that the person who asked for the information got the information? Do they have a right to it? Do we think you ought to have given it to them? That's one kind of question. But what I'm particularly interested in here is the question of the difference between lying and misleading. Whether it was okay or not to deceive them, then what method of deception would be the better one to use? In those cases where the lie is totally innocuous, it just doesn't matter which form of deception you use. But in cases where we do care about the information, where we are worried about the status of the informant, that seems to me the important thing about your examples there is that if you lie to me and you say that you're feeling fine when actually you're ill, I don't go away thinking I can't rely on a damn word Nigel says because he lied to me about that. But when it matters, when you know I care about the information that I'm asking for and that it's important to me, if you then lie to me, then I no longer treat you as a credible informant. Well, I'm thinking there could be harmful truths as well. So, literally, Vickensdheim was renowned for a kind of obsession with truth telling to himself and to other people so that it was a matter of integrity for him, that he would tell people exactly what he believed to be true. He's an example of somebody singing songs in German and he's saying more or less said what he thought of it when asked would you excuse my German because I'm an American singing German songs and Vickensdheim said no I couldn't possibly. That's a case where perhaps it would be better for him to just say something untrue. But it's also because it's a case where it would be better for him to say something untrue and most of us have that intuitive sense of that if he did, he wouldn't be damaging his credibility. So we don't treat it as a bad form of lying, we treat it as a perfectly acceptable white lie. When we do treat lies as bad, that's I think because they do damage the credibility of the informant. Yet I'm still thinking of people who deliberately mislead other people. If you had somebody who almost always, when asked questions, deflected in their responses away from the truth, they used these techniques to make me believe falsehoods, that feels from my perspective as bad as lying to me because it brings about the same consequence for me, results in me believing something which isn't true. It does, but it leaves you with an option that isn't open in the case of lying. If you know that somebody regularly misleads you, what they've done is they've damaged the credibility of their own implicatures. You know that they say things that are trying to mislead you, so it may be that you can still ask them straight yes no questions and get the information out of them. Now, once you know someone's a liar, you don't have that option anymore. The liar has damaged their credibility of their assertions as well as the credibility of their implicatures, whereas the misleader has only damaged the credibility of their implicatures. Okay, so suppose we accept that, that telling an outright lie is worse than exploiting this conversational implicature in the way that you described. So, have we covered all the areas there of deceiving people with words because there might be other ways that you could deceive people? Yeah, there are. In particular, there's the form of deception that Harry Frankfurt memorably described as bullshit. In Frankfurt's definition, bullshit is speaking without regard to whether what you're saying is true or false. And it's doing so in a way that's deceptive. There are forms of speech where you don't care whether what you're saying is true or false, but you're not actually deceiving anyone either, telling a story, telling a joke. These are cases where you don't care whether it's true or false, but you're not trying to deceive anyone about it. Bullshitting is when you are trying to deceive people about it. You're trying to give the impression that what you're saying is true and that you know it to be true, but you don't care whether it's true or false, in fact. And that's not the same thing as lying and it's not the same thing as misleading because in those cases you do care that the misinformation that you're trying to get across is false. That's essential to your purpose as a liar or a misleading. But there are other forms of bullshit too, so you could say true things and want to exploit implicature to make the here believe something which you don't know whether it's true or false and you don't care whether it's true or false. So that's true assertions, but with bullshit implicatures. Could you give an example of that because it's quite hard to grasp in abstraction? Sure, I think most advertising works like this. They want to say things that are true, right? They use true assertions because they have to. That's the rules. What they're trying to get you to believe is that their product is the best product or their product will make you happy or something like that. It doesn't matter to them whether that is true or false to the advertiser. The advertiser's job is just to try and get you to believe it. So that's bullshit and that's bullshit in picture. What they're saying is true. It has to be, but what they're trying to get you to believe through the implicatures is bullshit. They don't care whether it's true or false. So in a sense the person who deals in bullshit has actually abandoned all pretence of interest in truth. Well, not the pretence of it, but has abandoned the interest in truth. That's right. And that's why Frankfurt famously says that bullshit might be a greater threat to the truth than lies because at least the liar has some respect for the truth. They care about what the truth is and they care that you don't know it. Whereas the bullshit seems to have left the whole plane of truth altogether. Now you've obviously thought quite deeply about lying and about deception with words in other ways. Has it actually changed how you live your life? Well, that would be telling. Jonathan Weber, thank you very much. Thank you. For more Philosophy Bites, go to www.philosophybites.com. You can also find details there of Philosophy Bites books and how to support us.