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pedanterrific comments on How to understand people better - Less Wrong
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Okay. So, what word do you use to describe the act of "stating things which you know to not be true"? Or does your variant of English not have a word for that act?
Such an act has different names in different contexts. In your scenario, what motivated your statement that the sky is green?
Alternatively, if you need to sum up the action in any context, the phrase "stating things which you know to not be true" suffices...
It does, doesn't it? Fancy that.
I don't see how that is supposed to matter. But because I'm curious, some hypothetical situations:
My motivation was to find out how my interlocutor would describe my statement.
Assume that you don't and can't know my motivation, as is commonly the case in the real world.
It was due to a random causeless quantum fluctuation, similar in theory to the idea of a 'Boltzmann brain', which acted on my neurons in a such a way as to output that statement and make me rationalize it as my idea.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/meaning/#GriPro
Propositional theories of meaning fail precisely because they have a great deal of trouble accounting for situations where our words don't match our intentions.
Intention always matters.
What does it say about me that my first instinctive response was "I'm a consequentialist, not a virtue ethicist."
It's not good enough to just be a consequentialist rather than a virtue ethicist. You have to be a conequentialist for the right reasons or it doesn't count.
Intentions are physical facts about brains. If you care about those particular physical facts, then you can be a consequentialist who cares about intentions.
Often, some of the physical facts that determine whether a certain word applies to a certain situation happen to be physical facts that fall under the heading of "intentions".
It's just... if "intention always matters" when choosing which word to use to describe someone else's actions, you spend an inordinate amount of time not knowing how to describe something while you gather data on the other agent's intentions, data which may not ever be definitive. That seems to rather miss the point of language.
When an actor says, "I am Hamlet, prince of Denmark" is he lying?
If yes, then why is there a negative connotation in the word lying?
Well he's certainly not telling the truth, and he's (probably) not honestly mistaken, so sure.
I'm not exactly sure I'm qualified to answer that, but if I had to speculate... because it's easier to accidentally mislead people by assuming they know you're not telling the truth than the opposite, and because it's valuable to society to pretend rigorous truth-telling is more laudable than it really is (i.e. "honest" has an unreservedly positive connotation, despite the fact that there are common social situations in which it is terribly impolite to actually be honest). Does that make sense?
Role playing can hardly be considered lying, as the latter usually implies an intent to deceive.
I am aware that this is the common understanding, yes. Apparently my definition is rather idiosyncratic.
This sounds vaguely like the idea once prevalent in legal proceedings that actors were not trustworthy as witnesses because their skill acting in plays showed that they could commit perjury undetected by the jury.
That theory is no longer accepted in law. And I think the modern understanding - that actors are no more or less likely to be dishonest than any other citizen - is the more rational position. Is society's modern view wrong?
Uh... well first of all, I don't see what any of those things have to do with each other. To put my objections in some kind of order:
The idea that actors' skill at lying is a reason to distrust their testimony is ridiculous. Juries, and people in general, are much worse lie detectors than they believe themselves to be. The bar is set so low that probably only really, unusually bad liars are ever caught by that method.
That said, experience and skill at acting probably does generalize into skill at other forms of lying - that seems intuitively true, and it's certainly been the case in my experience, so I have no reason to doubt it.
The unrelated claim of whether actors are equally likely to be dishonest as anyone else is also a terrible indicator of their reliability under oath. Presumably people who perjure themselves have a compelling reason, such that a constitutional tendency toward honesty wouldn't do what the threat of jailtime did not.
That said, I have no idea whether actors are more, equally or less likely to be dishonest than the general population. I'm not sure how you'd go about testing that hypothesis, either.
Does that about clear it up?