The folk theory of lying is a tiny bit wrong and I agree it should be patched. I definitely do not agree we should throw it out, or be uncertain whether lying exists.
Lying clearly exists.
1. Oftentimes people consider how best to lie about e.g. them being late. When they settle on the lie of telling their boss they were talking to their other boss and they weren’t, and they know this is a lie, that’s a central case of a lie—definitely not motivated cognition.
To expand our extensional definition to noncentral cases, you can consider some other ways people might tell maybe-lies when they are late. Among others, I have had the experiences [edit: grammar] of
2. telling someone I would be there in 10 minutes when it was going to take 20, and if you asked me on the side with no consequences I would immediately have been able to tell you that it was 20 even though in the moment I certainly hadn’t conceived myself as lying, and I think people would agree with me this is a lie (albeit white)
3. telling someone I would be there in 10 minutes when it was going to take 20, and if you asked me on the side with no consequences I would have still said 10, because my model definitely said 10, and once I started looking into my model I would notice that probably I was missing some contingencies, and that maybe I had been motivated at certain spots when forming my model, and I would start calculating… and I think most people would agree with me this is not a lie
4. telling someone I would be there in 10 minutes when it was going to take 20, and my model was formed epistemically virtuously despitely obviously there being good reasons for expecting shorter timescales, and who knows how long it would take me to find enough nuances to fix it and say 20. This is not a lie.
Ruby’s example of the workplace fits somewhere between numbers 1 and 2. Jessica’s example of short AI timelines I think is intended to fit 3 (although I think the situation is actually 4 for most people). The example of the political fact-checking doesn’t fit cleanly because politically we’re typically allowed to call anything wrong a “lie” regardless of intent, but I think is somewhere between 2 and 3 and I think nonpartisan people would agree that, unless the perpetrators actually could have said they were wrong about the stat, the case was not actually a lie (just a different type of bad falsehood reflecting on the character of those involved). There are certainly many gradations here, but I just wanted to show that there is actually a relatively commonly accepted implicit theory about when things are lies that fits with the territory and isn’t some sort of politicking map distortion as it seemed you were implying.
The intensional definition you found that included “conscious intent to deceive” is not actually the implicit folk theory most people operate under: they include number 2′s “unconscious intent to deceive” or “in-the-moment should-have-been-very-easy-to-tell-you-were-wrong obvious-motivated-cognition-cover-up”. I agree the explicit folk theory should be modified, though.
I also want to point out that this pattern of explicit vs implicit folk theories applies well to lots of other things. Consider “identity”—the explicit folk theory probably says something about souls or a real cohesive “I”, but the implicit version often uses distancing or phrases like “that wasn’t me” [edit: in the context of it being unlike their normal self, not that someone else literally did it] and things such that people clearly sort of know what’s going on. Other examples include theory of action, “I can’t do it”, various things around relationships, what is real as opposed to postmodernism, etc etc. To not cherry-pick, there are some difficult cases to consider like “speak your truth” or the problem of evil, but under nuanced consideration these fit with the dynamic of the others. I just mention this generalization because LW types (incl me) learned to tear apart all the folk theories because their explicit version were horribly contradictive, and while this has been very powerful for us I feel like an equally powerful skill is figuring out how to put Humpty-Dumpty back together again.
The folk theory of lying is a tiny bit wrong and I agree it should be patched. I definitely do not agree we should throw it out, or be uncertain whether lying exists.
Lying clearly exists.
1. Oftentimes people consider how best to lie about e.g. them being late. When they settle on the lie of telling their boss they were talking to their other boss and they weren’t, and they know this is a lie, that’s a central case of a lie—definitely not motivated cognition.
To expand our extensional definition to noncentral cases, you can consider some other ways people might tell maybe-lies when they are late. Among others, I have had the experiences [edit: grammar] of
2. telling someone I would be there in 10 minutes when it was going to take 20, and if you asked me on the side with no consequences I would immediately have been able to tell you that it was 20 even though in the moment I certainly hadn’t conceived myself as lying, and I think people would agree with me this is a lie (albeit white)
3. telling someone I would be there in 10 minutes when it was going to take 20, and if you asked me on the side with no consequences I would have still said 10, because my model definitely said 10, and once I started looking into my model I would notice that probably I was missing some contingencies, and that maybe I had been motivated at certain spots when forming my model, and I would start calculating… and I think most people would agree with me this is not a lie
4. telling someone I would be there in 10 minutes when it was going to take 20, and my model was formed epistemically virtuously despitely obviously there being good reasons for expecting shorter timescales, and who knows how long it would take me to find enough nuances to fix it and say 20. This is not a lie.
Ruby’s example of the workplace fits somewhere between numbers 1 and 2. Jessica’s example of short AI timelines I think is intended to fit 3 (although I think the situation is actually 4 for most people). The example of the political fact-checking doesn’t fit cleanly because politically we’re typically allowed to call anything wrong a “lie” regardless of intent, but I think is somewhere between 2 and 3 and I think nonpartisan people would agree that, unless the perpetrators actually could have said they were wrong about the stat, the case was not actually a lie (just a different type of bad falsehood reflecting on the character of those involved). There are certainly many gradations here, but I just wanted to show that there is actually a relatively commonly accepted implicit theory about when things are lies that fits with the territory and isn’t some sort of politicking map distortion as it seemed you were implying.
The intensional definition you found that included “conscious intent to deceive” is not actually the implicit folk theory most people operate under: they include number 2′s “unconscious intent to deceive” or “in-the-moment should-have-been-very-easy-to-tell-you-were-wrong obvious-motivated-cognition-cover-up”. I agree the explicit folk theory should be modified, though.
I also want to point out that this pattern of explicit vs implicit folk theories applies well to lots of other things. Consider “identity”—the explicit folk theory probably says something about souls or a real cohesive “I”, but the implicit version often uses distancing or phrases like “that wasn’t me” [edit: in the context of it being unlike their normal self, not that someone else literally did it] and things such that people clearly sort of know what’s going on. Other examples include theory of action, “I can’t do it”, various things around relationships, what is real as opposed to postmodernism, etc etc. To not cherry-pick, there are some difficult cases to consider like “speak your truth” or the problem of evil, but under nuanced consideration these fit with the dynamic of the others. I just mention this generalization because LW types (incl me) learned to tear apart all the folk theories because their explicit version were horribly contradictive, and while this has been very powerful for us I feel like an equally powerful skill is figuring out how to put Humpty-Dumpty back together again.