Intentional actions may be contrasted with unintentional actions, which are generally the result of either instinct or accident. More precisely, we may say that unintentional actions are either the result of some unconscious cognitive process that culminates in that action (eg. habits, instincts), or they are not, as is the case with accidents and primitive reflexes. An intentional action, on the other hand, is the result of a cognitive process, but one that aims at a definite goal.
To take an example from the LessWrong canon, suppose you are purchasing a trunk in which to keep your school supplies. You like the shiny one, but cannot quite permit yourself to choose the trunk on this basis, so you come up with all sorts of reasons about why that trunk is the best one — all these reasons being unrelated to its shine, of course. But ultimately you still picked it because it was shiny, for all that you have rationalised your way into not even noticing that that was your real motive for choosing that particular trunk.
The fact that an action is driven by a particular intent does not imply that you must be reflectively aware of that intent. Actually, the very fact that it is possible to gain awareness of your intents by introspection seems to imply that the intents exist prior to becoming aware of them.
Now consider how this relates to lying — we shall take another classic LessWrongian example: that of religious belief-in-belief: a person who thinks he believes in God but actually doesn’t, as revealed by his overall behaviour and other aspects of his worldview. In the course of consoling a troubled friend, he might declare “God does exist and he really does answer prayers.” If you were to accuse him of lying, he would be quite aghast because he can readily point to lots of evidence that he is indeed a Christian: he goes to church every Sunday, he prays every evening before supper, he knows a lot of church liturgy, listens to Christian rock, and so on.
But the fact remains that he intentionally made an assertion that he does not believe to be true. I must choose my words carefully here: it is not that he intended to make a false statement, which would imply he has reflected on the statement itself and deemed it untrue. It is not the statement but its content that he disbelieves in. He simply has not quite realised that the statement relates to such content; that it indicates a world-model he does not actually have. He has intentionally made a statement that consists of a factual assertion, but he does not believe his own assertion. This makes it a lie, but it is not an intentional lie, in that he did not consciously make the decision ”...and now I am going to lie”. We might call it an unintentional lie.
In reality, it is of course quite rare to hear Christians firmly say “God does exist” rather than “I believe in God”. Indeed, this phraseological curiosity is commonly cited when explaining belief-in-belief. Yet, when it comes to political discourse, it is common for people to engage in spin, and this spin may very well include making assertions that do not actually match the speaker’s internal beliefs. When it comes to argumentation that involves multiple steps, it is especially likely that you will wind up coming up with assertions that do not actually match your world-model, but which you rationalise your way into believing are true. Again, consider carefully the wording: you do not rationalise yourself into actually agreeing with the content of your statements, but only rationalise your way into believing your statements are in accord with your worldview. It is not your beliefs about object-level reality that are being subjected to a process of rationalisation; it is the very correspondence between your statement and your beliefs. The two are in conflict, but you come up with rationalisations to the effect that they are not in conflict.
This is a type of lie, but if you are accused of this lie, and you are like most people, you will think that you can just dismiss the accusation out of hand, because you would know it if you are lying. This is not so. It is actually entirely possible to lie without realising that you are lying, and this is quite commonly the case where unintentional lies are concerned.
Actually, it can be even more insidious than that; it is also possible to have lied intentionally and nevertheless be unaware of the fact almost immediately after. Suppose you are a theft and have just gotten in trouble with some police officer for stealing something. You live in a particularly draconian regime where the penalty for theft is to have your hand cut off, so you decide to lie to save yourself. You tell the officer: “It was out in the open and I worried someone would steal it, so I decided I’d keep it safe until its proper owner came back”. In line with advice about how the key to effective lying is to keep the story as close to the truth as possible, you reason that, if the owner had come up to you and actually pressed you for the item back, you would have readily given it (to prevent trouble) and told him that you took it to keep it safe from would-be thieves. Therefore, you reason, there really is a grain of truth in the story you told the officer. Really, it can hardly be called a lie at all...
So it is possible to be unaware of lying, even if the lying is actually intentional. The human mind is capable of some rather twisted levels of doublethink. But am I not just being pedantic? Is “I didn’t know it!” not a legitimate defence for lying?
Quite frankly, no. If we make a habit of excusing people of lying on grounds that the liar is not aware of his own dishonesty, then we create a strong incentive for precisely this kind of deep doublethink. But anyone who has dealt with people who are habituated to this sort of lying will know that they are much more impossible to speak sensibly with than even people who are knowingly lying. This is because unconscious lying is not actually any less dishonest; it consists chiefly of the liar lying to himself to hide the first lie from himself. A lie, openly admitted to yourself, actually takes a level of inner clarity and straightforwardness that is well beyond most people’s capacity for honesty.
Moreover, the conception of lying as requiring conscious intent has infected the thinking on related issues too, like good and bad faith. Anyone who thinks about the matter seriously will realise that it is not only possible but common to be in bad faith without realising it: people rarely decide consciously to argue in bad faith, and yet bad faith is tragically widespread. In fact, people engaged in bad faith are typically indignant and feel like their indignation is righteous and that they are justified in acting the way they do.
Yet most people still believe they can refute (to themselves) accusations of bad faith by simply asking themselves “am I in bad faith right now?” and getting an indignant “No!” as the answer. This has led to an internet culture where a great many people feel justified in banning or muting or blocking (as the case may be) anyone who accuses them of bad faith, without even feeling compelled to examine rigorously the merits of the particular accusation on each given occasion. This in turn shields them from criticism against their honesty and intellectual integrity, which in practice gives them license to engage in almost arbitrary levels of bad faith.
So if there is one misconception I could remove from people, it would be the misconception that people are always conscious of when they are lying or being in bad faith.
On Intentionality, or: Towards a More Inclusive Concept of Lying
Intentional actions may be contrasted with unintentional actions, which are generally the result of either instinct or accident. More precisely, we may say that unintentional actions are either the result of some unconscious cognitive process that culminates in that action (eg. habits, instincts), or they are not, as is the case with accidents and primitive reflexes. An intentional action, on the other hand, is the result of a cognitive process, but one that aims at a definite goal.
To take an example from the LessWrong canon, suppose you are purchasing a trunk in which to keep your school supplies. You like the shiny one, but cannot quite permit yourself to choose the trunk on this basis, so you come up with all sorts of reasons about why that trunk is the best one — all these reasons being unrelated to its shine, of course. But ultimately you still picked it because it was shiny, for all that you have rationalised your way into not even noticing that that was your real motive for choosing that particular trunk.
The fact that an action is driven by a particular intent does not imply that you must be reflectively aware of that intent. Actually, the very fact that it is possible to gain awareness of your intents by introspection seems to imply that the intents exist prior to becoming aware of them.
Now consider how this relates to lying — we shall take another classic LessWrongian example: that of religious belief-in-belief: a person who thinks he believes in God but actually doesn’t, as revealed by his overall behaviour and other aspects of his worldview. In the course of consoling a troubled friend, he might declare “God does exist and he really does answer prayers.” If you were to accuse him of lying, he would be quite aghast because he can readily point to lots of evidence that he is indeed a Christian: he goes to church every Sunday, he prays every evening before supper, he knows a lot of church liturgy, listens to Christian rock, and so on.
But the fact remains that he intentionally made an assertion that he does not believe to be true. I must choose my words carefully here: it is not that he intended to make a false statement, which would imply he has reflected on the statement itself and deemed it untrue. It is not the statement but its content that he disbelieves in. He simply has not quite realised that the statement relates to such content; that it indicates a world-model he does not actually have. He has intentionally made a statement that consists of a factual assertion, but he does not believe his own assertion. This makes it a lie, but it is not an intentional lie, in that he did not consciously make the decision ”...and now I am going to lie”. We might call it an unintentional lie.
In reality, it is of course quite rare to hear Christians firmly say “God does exist” rather than “I believe in God”. Indeed, this phraseological curiosity is commonly cited when explaining belief-in-belief. Yet, when it comes to political discourse, it is common for people to engage in spin, and this spin may very well include making assertions that do not actually match the speaker’s internal beliefs. When it comes to argumentation that involves multiple steps, it is especially likely that you will wind up coming up with assertions that do not actually match your world-model, but which you rationalise your way into believing are true. Again, consider carefully the wording: you do not rationalise yourself into actually agreeing with the content of your statements, but only rationalise your way into believing your statements are in accord with your worldview. It is not your beliefs about object-level reality that are being subjected to a process of rationalisation; it is the very correspondence between your statement and your beliefs. The two are in conflict, but you come up with rationalisations to the effect that they are not in conflict.
This is a type of lie, but if you are accused of this lie, and you are like most people, you will think that you can just dismiss the accusation out of hand, because you would know it if you are lying. This is not so. It is actually entirely possible to lie without realising that you are lying, and this is quite commonly the case where unintentional lies are concerned.
Actually, it can be even more insidious than that; it is also possible to have lied intentionally and nevertheless be unaware of the fact almost immediately after. Suppose you are a theft and have just gotten in trouble with some police officer for stealing something. You live in a particularly draconian regime where the penalty for theft is to have your hand cut off, so you decide to lie to save yourself. You tell the officer: “It was out in the open and I worried someone would steal it, so I decided I’d keep it safe until its proper owner came back”. In line with advice about how the key to effective lying is to keep the story as close to the truth as possible, you reason that, if the owner had come up to you and actually pressed you for the item back, you would have readily given it (to prevent trouble) and told him that you took it to keep it safe from would-be thieves. Therefore, you reason, there really is a grain of truth in the story you told the officer. Really, it can hardly be called a lie at all...
So it is possible to be unaware of lying, even if the lying is actually intentional. The human mind is capable of some rather twisted levels of doublethink. But am I not just being pedantic? Is “I didn’t know it!” not a legitimate defence for lying?
Quite frankly, no. If we make a habit of excusing people of lying on grounds that the liar is not aware of his own dishonesty, then we create a strong incentive for precisely this kind of deep doublethink. But anyone who has dealt with people who are habituated to this sort of lying will know that they are much more impossible to speak sensibly with than even people who are knowingly lying. This is because unconscious lying is not actually any less dishonest; it consists chiefly of the liar lying to himself to hide the first lie from himself. A lie, openly admitted to yourself, actually takes a level of inner clarity and straightforwardness that is well beyond most people’s capacity for honesty.
Moreover, the conception of lying as requiring conscious intent has infected the thinking on related issues too, like good and bad faith. Anyone who thinks about the matter seriously will realise that it is not only possible but common to be in bad faith without realising it: people rarely decide consciously to argue in bad faith, and yet bad faith is tragically widespread. In fact, people engaged in bad faith are typically indignant and feel like their indignation is righteous and that they are justified in acting the way they do.
Yet most people still believe they can refute (to themselves) accusations of bad faith by simply asking themselves “am I in bad faith right now?” and getting an indignant “No!” as the answer. This has led to an internet culture where a great many people feel justified in banning or muting or blocking (as the case may be) anyone who accuses them of bad faith, without even feeling compelled to examine rigorously the merits of the particular accusation on each given occasion. This in turn shields them from criticism against their honesty and intellectual integrity, which in practice gives them license to engage in almost arbitrary levels of bad faith.
So if there is one misconception I could remove from people, it would be the misconception that people are always conscious of when they are lying or being in bad faith.