True Lie

It's interesting that constructing a self-consistent system of falsehood bears many similarities to the pursuit of truth.

Did you notice that two theories of truth were employed to build the lie? In establishing how to lie, I made two statements:

1. You need to create a system in which everything coheres.


2. Your lies need to be consistent with what apparent reality.

The first was the coherence theory of truth, which basically means that what you say needs to agree with other stuff that you say. In other words, you should stick to your story. To take a straightforward example, you can't say that you're wearing a size eight dress and then later talk about shopping for twelves. In order to do so you need to be quite careful that you formulate a credible story, or explanation for things. It has to be likely to agree with other things that you would tend to say, and with other things that you have established.

The second is the correspondence theory of truth. This means that the proposition you make has to correspond to a factual reality. Like what I said before, in order to lie successfully, your story has to agree with certain witnessed facts. This will make it much more believable, because once someone knows that some things you say are true, and if your story tends to make logical sense, people will tend to believe you.

The third thing that I mentioned was Ockham's razor. In other words, keep your attempts at explanations as simple as possible, given all the accepted facts. In the case of a lie it's more believable. In the case of truth, it's more likely to be true. We only need to look at the elegance of physics formulae to see this case in point.

It would seem as if truth were intrinsically linked in falsehood. But wait, you say. You disagree, similarities extend only up to the fact that you want to make the lie as truthful as possible in order to be believable. Yet when we look at the way knowledge is discovered, we can only admit that we are as good as our best guess. The only difference between truth and prevarication, as we know it, is that in a lie, we know something that the other person does not, and attempt not to include that fact in our explanation.

When we attempt to discover the truth, we first take into consideration the preexisting conditions. We imagine the situation from various angles and make guesses as to the most likely explanation. Indeed, until we have rigorously tested our theories, we can hardly claim them to be more than conjectures, or propositions that we would like you to believe. We might even go as far as to say that until they are proven true, they might be considered to be lies. The ability to lie comes from these same skills.

Not to mention, so-called accepted "truths" have often proved false. There is the infamous, and over-used example of the ancient belief that the earth was the center of the universe, or that the earth was flat. We now know that this is not so. However, they made claims that best fit the situational evidence. Although some data was not perfectly in agreement with the claims, one can hardly say that in the past, the great thinkers of the era were lying to us, or falsifying fact.

I'm not saying that deliberate lying is morally acceptable. Rather, I put it to you that the line between truth and lie comes not so much a clear-cut distinction, but as the fuzzy intersection between two polarly opposite, yet infinitesimally different sets. It is this dichotomisation which knowledge depends on, like cells, to go forth, be fruitful, and multiply.

Which makes me wonder whether Adam and Eve's biggest sin was to taste of the forbidden fruit, or deny it (as you might have guessed, my next post in the theme will be on denial).