Like honesty, loyalty, and frankness, lying is also a fundamental concept of all human culture across the world. But unlike honesty, loyalty, and frankness, lying is something discouraged and rebuked even among professional liars themselves. But what is lying? So far from the mainstream culture (which to a great degree is represented from the dictionaries written to explain the meanings of language contents) and from our daily life experience we could find two essential aspects in human perception of lying: 1) not telling the truth; 2) intentional.
Besides those two basics mentioned above, very often people would refer lying as an activity that is meant to benefit by hurting others. However, in real life we could often find that even if someone lies, he might not necessarily mean to hurt others; indeed sometimes people might lie in good will to help make someone else feel better or doing a good favor for those whom they are lying to. Therefore, as a general definition, we should not mark lying as malicious even though identifying malicious lying is the main reason behind our interest in learning the nature of lying.
Metaphysically speaking, intentional certainly should be one of the basic attributes of lying; however, it might be very hard for us to determine the unsaid intention of anyone. Although very often we do have some logically solid evidence showing that someone is making some false statement intentionally which could be identified as lying, but also very often in real life some people are wrongly accused of intentionally saying or doing something while he did not have the accused intention at all. Compared to the statement of “benefiting through hurting someone intentionally”, the statement of “not telling the truth” sounds much more objective and verifiable since it is based upon the examination of the objective truth. Therefore, not telling the truth should be taken as the basic or primary criterion for examining whether someone is possibly lying and then to judge his intention with caution as the secondary criterion.
However, if we really want to apply “not telling the truth” to judge whether someone is lying then we might face the difficulty of distinguishing lying from normal conversations in everyday life simply because it is normally not an easy thing to provide a description that is perfectly the same as what has happened. In order to correctly and clearly report what has happened, one not only needs to know very well about what has happened and to be capable of expressing things clearly using specific language but also needs to have enough time to give the complete report. Strictly speaking, for most of the time in real life, the descriptions given by ordinary people about what they experienced would normally not match the real happening very well and thus if we use “not telling the truth” to define lying, then we will conclude that in everyday normal life, most people are lying all the time.
Let’s consider a commonly familiar scenario: John experienced something, and then he met Jack; in order to describe the thing correctly and completely John might need to spend one hour, but he only had 3 minutes at that time. What might make it even worse could be that if John started to talk about that thing but only gave a partial report then there would be a good chance for Jack to misunderstand John due to some complicated historical relationship between John and Jack; and John knew that in case Jack misunderstood him at that moment, Jack might very possibly despise or even hate him. A simple solution to avoid making a lie in this case seems to be keeping silence without mentioning a thing about it. However, life is not always tailor-designed for simple solutions. If Jack heard about that thing before he met John then he might directly ask John when he met John whether he had experienced that thing. In that case, if John answered yes, Jack could most probably push John to tell him what happened. If John would definitely meet Jack soon and they have good relationship, then John might say “tell you later”; however, if John would not see Jack very soon and their relationship is not very good but very complicated (which is normal in today’s social life around the world), then it might not even be proper for him to say “tell you later” to Jack. However, since John did not have enough time to clearly explain the whole thing, then any description he would provide under that circumstance could not be a true report of what had happened. Therefore, even if John told Jack that he did experience that thing, what he would tell Jack about the happening would not be the same as what really happened since he might not have enough time to articulate the complexity of the happening, and according to the “not telling the truth” criterion, he would be lying within that 3 minutes, and that lying could most probably cause Jack to misunderstand him based on the scenario I stated above. But on the other hand, he could choose to make another lie instead by telling Jack that he did not experience that thing, which could save him a lot of trouble and could avoid the risk to cause Jack to misunderstand him.
The moral of this hypothetical example is that one needs to have a certain prerequisite condition to tell the complete truth and in real life so much often we might find that we are practically lacking that condition. In that kind of situation, no matter what we say, according to the “not telling the truth” criterion, we would be lying anyway. What could be worse is that when we are in that kind of situation we might probably even not have the option of not saying anything, and thus what we would be facing is not the choice of telling a lie or not (since whatever we say would not be the truth due to the lack of the condition for us to tell the truth), but rather the choice of telling what kind of lie.
Furthermore, in real life in order to tell a complete truth, we would not only need the above-mentioned condition but also need to have a good accessibility to the evidence. Even if someone is telling all the truth, but as long as he could not provide the evidence, others might still consider that he is telling a lie or even making a malicious rumor, and thus it would cause a misunderstanding in the end anyway, which, in certain extreme situations, could even cause the reporter to be killed by someone who misunderstands him. Under this kind of circumstances, that reporter might have to tell some lie to avoid being misunderstood or even getting killed. Besides, even if he has some evidence and has the prerequisite condition mentioned above, whatever he says might not be completely the same as what has happened simply due to the common limitation of every single human being in expressing what is in his mind, and according to the “not telling the truth” criterion he would still be lying! Therefore, we might sometimes need the so-called white lies or kind lies in life simply because we are in lack of the condition for us not to tell a lie.
However, over the past thousands of years, human beings have always thought that we could clearly identify what is a lie, and based upon this logical assertion scientists have even invented the special equipment called lie detector (or polygraph), which has been used by many governmental agents or private companies as the tool to detect whether a person is lying. As we have seen from the above discussion that if we apply the objective criterion of “not telling the truth” in a strict way then everyone might be lying everyday, which means that even this objective criterion for judging lying might practically not be very useful. Then how could a lie detector tell who is lying if we even could not find a clear logic to define a practically useful objective criterion for identifying a lie?
As a matter of fact, whenever people find that the objective criterion of “not telling the truth” could not effectively help them to identify a true lying behavior in daily life they would apply the previously mentioned subjective criterion “intentional” as a remedy to the awkward problem. In other words, in social practices people are usually judging a lying behavior not completely based upon an objective criterion (even though so much often they would claim so) but based upon a half objective and half subjective criterion of whether a person is knowing that what he tells is not true, which is the logical basis for the design of any lie detector.
Let’s evaluate the effectiveness of any lie detector based upon the criterion of “a person is aware that what he tells is not true”, which is a combination of the criterion of “not telling the truth” and the criterion of “knowingly behaving”. Before this analysis, we need to clarify one more relevant concept, which could be called the tolerance of the error to the detailed truth, and another closely related concept, which is called the key fact of an event.
Although we could not provide a precise description to every single event in life, but normally we would not feel any problem to judge what is true and what is false. That is because we could tolerate a certain degree of error in the description of an event, and within that degree of tolerance we could accept or even completely ignore the error. For example, John saw Jeff stole the cow of Jack and he told Jack what Jeff did, if Jack could find the cow from Jeff’s home, then he would consider what John told him is a true report of what happened and he won’t care much about whether John told him the details of the stealing or not. In this example, obviously what Jack cares about is the key fact of stealing a cow and thus the details could be considered as within the tolerance of error.
However, in real life, things are not always so simple as in the above example of stealing a cow. Real life events might involve many complicated relationships, and there might be many nuances in the causes of the events. When we encounter very complicated and subtle events, the error in the descriptions of the events might cause people from different backgrounds or different standpoints of view to have very different feelings and attitudes. Therefore, human tolerance about the error in the descriptions of the events is also a mixture of objectiveness and subjectiveness. It is objective because it requires that the description should be fundamentally consistent with the truth. If John told Jack that Jeff stole his cow, but Jeff could prove that he did not do it, then people would consider that John was lying in order to set up a false accusation against Jeff. However, the tolerance of error is also very subjective because we could not find a universal standard of tolerance of error and thus different people would have different tolerance of error for the description of the details of the events. Furthermore, although it might take much shorter time to provide a description of some part of an event that is considered as the key fact of that event, it would still require the prerequisite conditions as I mentioned earlier to provide the true report even if ignoring certain details as tolerated error. In fact, even the capacity for identifying the key fact which would provide a roughly true report could be a special talent and we might not always be able to pin down that kind of key facts in general.
After we are clear about the concepts of key fact and the tolerance of the error to the detailed truth, we might start to metaphysically analyze how a lie detector functions and its effectiveness. First of all, in order to determine whether someone is lying, the designers of the lie detecting questions need to first analyze the issue very carefully to identify the key facts of the issue in order to create the proper questions that would grasp the essence of the issue. By doing so they could reduce as much as possible the dependence of the testing result upon the knowledge of the details of the concerned process. Secondly, after we have done the detection test, what we could judge in fact is not whether the detectee is lying or not, but whether the detectee considers or feels himself is lying or not. If the answer of the detectee is not true but he considers it as true by himself, then the lie detector would not be able to find the fact that the answer is not true. For example, if the operator asks a confused suspect whether he damaged a treasure and he says yes because he thinks that he did while he was actually cheated by the real doer, then the lie detector would provide the wrong solution that the detectee is responsible for the damage of that treasure. In real life we might all have such kind of experience that we firmly believed that we knew some truth but several days or even several years later we learned that we were making a mistake.
Therefore, as a matter of fact, by combining the criterion of “not telling the truth” and “knowingly behaving” together, the inventor and user of lie detector are virtually providing a definition of liar as the person who knew that what he said was not true but still said it. Very clear and precise though this definition might sound, it is still not proper for a universally valid definition of lying, no matter for judging professional or nonprofessional descriptions of an event.
In order to have effective lie detection, the operator needs to phrase a question that could be replied with a clear and definite answer so that the detection could have a relatively high tolerance of error for the details. This type of design and questioning could obviously only be possible for professional lie detection but not for ordinary conversations in everyday life. In general everyday life events, ordinary people would not always be able to find meaningful questions that could be replied with clear and definite answers, and people normally could not question each other in an interrogative way as the professional would do in lie detections. For most of the cases, people don’t have the mandate even to question each other in details, no matter how politely they might try to be, and thus they could only judge whether someone is lying based upon their own experience and feelings. Accordingly, when someone tells an untrue story it might not be easy for others to judge whether he is knowingly or unknowingly telling the false story.
Besides, for the similar reason as I mentioned when analyzing the usefulness of the criterion “not telling the truth”, if we simply use “knowingly say something that is not true” as the definition of lying, then we could easily conclude that every person is lying every day. This is because even though most people under most circumstances would attempt to speak based upon facts, everyone would knowingly say something that is not 100% true everyday simply because of the lack of the condition as I mentioned earlier or because of some complicated real life reasons. In other words, people are not only making untrue statement everyday but also aware in heart that some part of their statements are not really true; they do this either because they don’t know how to do it otherwise due to the limited condition or because they don’t want to make some troubles for themselves or for others. Obviously this is not what we mean as lying in our life. As a matter of fact, both saying half truth and complete untruth are not telling the truth and we really could not tell which of them is worse since sometimes saying half truth could be much more misleading, and thus so much often people would choose to say something that is not true simply to avoid the misunderstanding caused by saying half of the truth when they have to say something. Therefore, same as the criterion of “not telling the truth”, the criterion of “knowingly say something that is not true” could only tell us that people are frequently making a choice between two different ways of lying since so much often they don’t have another choice at all due to all kinds of human limitations.
Besides, we don’t have a general methodology or protocol to help us to systematically find the “reasonable question that could be replied with a clear and definite answer” as the designers of lie detecting questions might want to do. Searching or defining such questions for lie detection itself is quite a subjective art that needs some professional training. When people thought that they have had found such kind questions and expect to get the answers that could solve their utmost concern for the specific lie detection, their questions might not always be virtually effective to serve their purpose, and thus no matter how the detectee answer the questions, there is still chances for the answer to be untrue. In case the detectee is asked an improper question but he does not have the option of not answering, then it is not fair to the detectee. For example, in today’s questionnaire survey such as those provided to the candidates in the job market or provided on some other occasions, very often no matter how the surveyed person answers he would tell the wrong answer. The request of self-rating with a scale of 1 to 10 is a typical example of this kind. If the government is using similar kind of questions in their lie detection to determine who is lying, then there could be a lot of wrong accusation simply because of the impotence of the detecting question designers.
Furthermore, even if people could find a “reasonable question that could be replied with a clear and definite answer”, since the principle of lie detection is not to find whether what the detectee said is true or not, but to find whether the detectee considers he is telling the truth or not, there could be two major potential errors: 1) those who are familiar with the mechanism and techniques of lie detection could train themselves to beat the lie detector by following certain principles in their answer and imagine that whatever they say is true (in fact, we might have found that politicians are usually very quick in responding public questions while not violating their political principles and behaving like they truly believe what they say even though they might change quickly afterwards); 2) even if those who conduct the lie detection consider the questions are clear and certain, due to some unknown background, the detectee might feel some uncertainty about the answers or connect the questions to some more complicated but hard to explain issues; in this case he might be judged as lying by the lie detector since no matter how he answers he might feel that he is not telling truth anyway, especially if he is a person who is in lack of confidence all his life for complicated issues and for issues that might cause him nervous.
The significance of the discussion about the effectiveness of lie detector is not for rating the business of lie detection, but to illustrate the philosophical meaning of lying through the examination of this scientific idea of detecting lying by specially designed machines. The above discussion tells that there is a great deal of uncertainty in human perception about the concept of lying that has been one of the basic building blocks in human social logic for thousands of years though (no wonder we have so many people were wrongly accused of lying and then got executed in the past; and we are not sure how many legal statutes are still built upon this kind of criterion for judging lying). This uncertainty could not be offset by any technological implementation since it is rooted in the logical deficiency. This uncertainty would also infer the uncertainty in our concept about honesty since we perceive the meaning of honesty as an antithesis of lying.
