Centrally, a lie is a statement that contradicts reality, and
my initial reaction to this was: “what? a lie doesn’t have to contradict reality, right? eg if i thought that 2+2=5, then if i told you that 2+2=4, i’d be lying to you, right?”
but then i looked at the google definition of a lie and was surprised to see it agreed with this sentence of your post. but i sort of still don’t believe this is really the canonical meaning. chatgpt seems to agree with me lol: https://chatgpt.com/share/696eed66-ab40-800f-9157-0e7d04f5362a
(of course we can choose to use the word either way. i’m mostly saying this because i think it’s plausible your reaction will just be “oops”. if you stand by this meaning, then probably one should discuss which notion better fits the ways in which we already want to use the term, but i’m not actually that interested in having that discussion)
Yes, oops—whether speech is a ‘lie’ in this context should definitely depend on the speaker’s world model, not the facts of the world itself. I probably accidentally cut this dependence out during a rewrite and then missed it b/c of editorial blindness.
my initial reaction to this was: “what? a lie doesn’t have to contradict reality, right? eg if i thought that 2+2=5, then if i told you that 2+2=4, i’d be lying to you, right?”
but then i looked at the google definition of a lie and was surprised to see it agreed with this sentence of your post. but i sort of still don’t believe this is really the canonical meaning. chatgpt seems to agree with me lol: https://chatgpt.com/share/696eed66-ab40-800f-9157-0e7d04f5362a
(of course we can choose to use the word either way. i’m mostly saying this because i think it’s plausible your reaction will just be “oops”. if you stand by this meaning, then probably one should discuss which notion better fits the ways in which we already want to use the term, but i’m not actually that interested in having that discussion)
Yes, oops—whether speech is a ‘lie’ in this context should definitely depend on the speaker’s world model, not the facts of the world itself. I probably accidentally cut this dependence out during a rewrite and then missed it b/c of editorial blindness.