A similar argument occurred to me, but I think it does border on proving too much. It also depends on knowing what the listener will make of the sentence. I think that the concept of “lying” does depend largely on the idea that the explicit, plain meaning of a sentence having a privileged position, over implications, signalling, Bayesian updates caused by the statement, etc. If someone says “Well, the probability of me telling you that I am not having an affair, given that I am having an affair, is not much smaller than the probability given that I am not having an affair, so if you significantly updated your prior simply because of my denial, the blame is on your end, not mine”, I don’t think many people would find that a reasonable response.
If you tell something like this: “yes, I’m pissed that you shat in the bed again because I was about to go on break and now I can’t and I’m hungry and cranky.”, the patient is going to form a lot of important beliefs regarding the question they’re asked that are not true, more than if you say “this doesn’t bother me”. You have to say what ever sentence ends up misleading the patient the least about what they want to know.
For the affair on the other hand, it is not so, they’d form more valid beliefs if you said that you are having an affair, than if you say you don’t.
The truth is such word noises, body language, intonation, and so on, that mislead the listener the least. Usually has to be approximate due to imperfect knowledge and so on.
Having an affair is discrete, while the annoyance level is continuous. There’s simply no explicit, plain meaning possible for continuous variable like that, one has to deduce it from the tone of the voice, body language, etc etc etc etc. One could of course have friendly body language and tone while saying something like “yes, it is incredibly annoying” but that would merely confuse the listener.
A similar argument occurred to me, but I think it does border on proving too much. It also depends on knowing what the listener will make of the sentence. I think that the concept of “lying” does depend largely on the idea that the explicit, plain meaning of a sentence having a privileged position, over implications, signalling, Bayesian updates caused by the statement, etc. If someone says “Well, the probability of me telling you that I am not having an affair, given that I am having an affair, is not much smaller than the probability given that I am not having an affair, so if you significantly updated your prior simply because of my denial, the blame is on your end, not mine”, I don’t think many people would find that a reasonable response.
I think I pinned down the distinction here.
If you tell something like this: “yes, I’m pissed that you shat in the bed again because I was about to go on break and now I can’t and I’m hungry and cranky.”, the patient is going to form a lot of important beliefs regarding the question they’re asked that are not true, more than if you say “this doesn’t bother me”. You have to say what ever sentence ends up misleading the patient the least about what they want to know.
For the affair on the other hand, it is not so, they’d form more valid beliefs if you said that you are having an affair, than if you say you don’t.
The truth is such word noises, body language, intonation, and so on, that mislead the listener the least. Usually has to be approximate due to imperfect knowledge and so on.
Having an affair is discrete, while the annoyance level is continuous. There’s simply no explicit, plain meaning possible for continuous variable like that, one has to deduce it from the tone of the voice, body language, etc etc etc etc. One could of course have friendly body language and tone while saying something like “yes, it is incredibly annoying” but that would merely confuse the listener.