In the course of speaking honestly, you might not be speaking with everything you know and identify with present in mind. Maybe your working memory can’t easily reconcile everything known at once. To take one instance of honest expression and deem it decisively representative of a person’s entire potential honesty, as if you had never confronted a complex dilemma and spoke based on formative impressions, is an act of bad faith, or just very naive.
Listeners might have misconceptions about the required implications of the spoken words as well.
We can accept all of: A. The spoken words tell us something about the person’s mindset B. The spoken words don’t tell us everything about the person’s mindset C. The background assumptions with which we make inferences about the person’s mindset given their spoken words might be flawed D. The speaker might not mean all of the connotations perceived by the listeners E. Listeners are predisposed to hearing things in extremely simplistic terms, especially on certain topics, and are irrationally unprepared to even entertain background information from which the speaker makes sense F. The speaker is being honest with respect to the information they are biologically capable of thinking about at one time, which may not be all the information they can notice, and future versions of themselves could readily disavow old positions once this information is recalled; “future” being as soon as during the course of the same conversation, awkward though it may be to reveal your imperfection.
In the course of speaking honestly, you might not be speaking with everything you know and identify with present in mind. Maybe your working memory can’t easily reconcile everything known at once. To take one instance of honest expression and deem it decisively representative of a person’s entire potential honesty, as if you had never confronted a complex dilemma and spoke based on formative impressions, is an act of bad faith, or just very naive.
Listeners might have misconceptions about the required implications of the spoken words as well.
We can accept all of:
A. The spoken words tell us something about the person’s mindset
B. The spoken words don’t tell us everything about the person’s mindset
C. The background assumptions with which we make inferences about the person’s mindset given their spoken words might be flawed
D. The speaker might not mean all of the connotations perceived by the listeners
E. Listeners are predisposed to hearing things in extremely simplistic terms, especially on certain topics, and are irrationally unprepared to even entertain background information from which the speaker makes sense
F. The speaker is being honest with respect to the information they are biologically capable of thinking about at one time, which may not be all the information they can notice, and future versions of themselves could readily disavow old positions once this information is recalled; “future” being as soon as during the course of the same conversation, awkward though it may be to reveal your imperfection.