(Because often “I’m fine” is false, you see. If this has never bothered you then you are perhaps not in the target audience for this essay.)
This does bother me, but I’ve come to the conclusion that “How are you?” usually isn’t really a question—it’s a protocol, and the password you’re supposed to reply with is “Fine.” Almost no-one will take this to mean that you actually are fine, in my experience—they will take it to mean that you are following the normal rules of conversation, which is true. It’s much like how I can tell jokes, use idioms, or read a passage from a novel out loud—the information I’m conveying is true, even if the literal meaning of the words is not.
So here’s a rule that seems better in some ways than the wizard’s literal-truth rule—don’t try to cause people to have false beliefs. Of course, this removes much of your ability to deceive by clever phrasing; it’s a stricter standard of honesty than the wizard’s rule.
“Be at least as honest as an unusually honest person”
This doesn’t really tell me much. It just raises the question of “What standards of honesty does an unusually honest person follow?”, which doesn’t seem much easier a question than we started out with.
Yeah, this correct. Also, I think “I’m fine” generally literally true in the narrow sense, since it’s literally true that, for example, I am not in urgent need of medical attention at this moment.
If I was literally bleeding to death and someone asked my how I was and I said “I’m fine”, people would take that to be a falsehood in some sense. But if I’m physically healthy but emotionally upset, and someone asked me how I was and I said “fine”, people don’t consider that a lie, because it isn’t one, in the narrowest sense; I am “fine” in one sense of the word.
Which is also why it so often becomes the default answer, because it’s almost never a lie, in at least the very narrow “wizard’s rule” sense.
This does bother me, but I’ve come to the conclusion that “How are you?” usually isn’t really a question—it’s a protocol, and the password you’re supposed to reply with is “Fine.” Almost no-one will take this to mean that you actually are fine, in my experience—they will take it to mean that you are following the normal rules of conversation, which is true. It’s much like how I can tell jokes, use idioms, or read a passage from a novel out loud—the information I’m conveying is true, even if the literal meaning of the words is not.
So here’s a rule that seems better in some ways than the wizard’s literal-truth rule—don’t try to cause people to have false beliefs. Of course, this removes much of your ability to deceive by clever phrasing; it’s a stricter standard of honesty than the wizard’s rule.
This doesn’t really tell me much. It just raises the question of “What standards of honesty does an unusually honest person follow?”, which doesn’t seem much easier a question than we started out with.
Yeah, this correct. Also, I think “I’m fine” generally literally true in the narrow sense, since it’s literally true that, for example, I am not in urgent need of medical attention at this moment.
If I was literally bleeding to death and someone asked my how I was and I said “I’m fine”, people would take that to be a falsehood in some sense. But if I’m physically healthy but emotionally upset, and someone asked me how I was and I said “fine”, people don’t consider that a lie, because it isn’t one, in the narrowest sense; I am “fine” in one sense of the word.
Which is also why it so often becomes the default answer, because it’s almost never a lie, in at least the very narrow “wizard’s rule” sense.