To tell the truth

You know that game where a mommy smiles at her baby and the baby, after much struggle, smiles back? That sort of activity is the foundation of all human learning. Our brain's basic function is imitative/predictive. We learn to imitate patterns.

Head and shoulders, knees and toes, knees and toes, knees and toes.
Head and shoulders, knees and toes, knees and toes, knees and toes.
Eyes, ears, mouth and nose.

Mommy sings the words and makes the hand motions. Baby watches and, after an intensity of effort that would intimidate any adult, learns to make the right hand motions along with mommy. Later, the baby learns to sing the words along with mommy. The song includes patterns and variations. We might say, it includes patterns within a pattern. Eventually, the baby internalizes the patterns to the point that they get really good at being able to pick up new ones quickly. Every new song is sort of like the old ones only with variations. The song above, for example, uses the same tune as "London Bridge is Falling Down" (and many other children's songs) with different words.

The same goes for what we call the "meanings" of the word. At the very beginning, the child needs to know to move her hands the same way mommy does when mommy sings the song. Eventually, she will learn to move her hands at the sound of the words. Mommy plays a new game where she says, "baby knees" and her daughter touches her knees, "baby eyes" and she points at her eyes and so on. Learning this is a long process with much correction. The child isn't learning concepts. What the child is doing is imitating patterns and then learning how to predict patterns so she can act as is expected of her.

When we think about lying, we tend to imagine someone saying something she knows isn't true. And that description matches some lies. But it rapidly gets more complicated than that. Suppose Theresa borrowed her sister's ring without asking and then loses it. Her sister later wants to wear the ring asks Theresa if she knows where it is. Theresa says she doesn't know and that is, in a certain sense, the truth, for Theresa has no clue where it is. And yet Theresa is lying. Why do we feel so confident saying this?

Consider another example. When Elizabeth Warren claimed to be descended from indigenous peoples  it seems to me that she believed what she was saying. People inside her family had been telling her this since childhood. And yet, it is fair to call Warren a liar. Why do I say this? Because different standards of truth apply in different situations. You believe what your mother told you and you can repeat to others. Best, however, to hedge your bets; to not say, "I am part Cherokee "but rather say, "The family lore is that we're part Cherokee and it may be true, I hope it is, but I've never verified this."

What we call "truth telling" is a matter of the brains predictive function. My answer to your questions is based on my assurance that certain patterns will hold. If you ask me if I have an appendix, I will say I do have an appendix. I've never checked. If I had to justify my claim, I might say that I know of no operations, that there are no visible scars and that I've never heard of anyone being born without an appendix. It's not impossible, however, that I might not have one. There just isn't any reason to check.

I have, however, often heard of people who were told things about their ethnic heritage that turned out not to be true. There is every reason to check and not checking before filling out a form claiming minority status is lying.

Lying, and this is my main point, is very closely related to the notion of "what can you get away with". That makes us uncomfortable. We want lying to be more like following a rule. We want it to be something you can easily check.

When a man asks his wife if she loves him, she says, "yes," without even thinking about it. She may feel very much in love with him at the time but, more likely, she feels nothing at all. She's been married to the man for years now. She says, "yes," because that is the responsible answer. If she said "no" there would be serious and hurtful consequences. Assuming she's not an irresponsible jerk, saying "no" would be another way of saying, "I don't want to be married to you anymore." Either way, her answer is based on the predictive function of her brain. Her answer is based on what she senses the consequences of that answer will be.

When Elizabeth Warren grew up, she heard family lore about Cherokee and Delaware heritage. Repeating these stories inside the family had no negative consequences. No one called her a liar. So her brain got used to thinking this was safe pattern of behaviour. My guess is that Warren was probably surprised, even gobsmacked, when she was first accused of lying. She probably felt very strongly that she had not intended to deceive. But how would she know she wasn't lying to herself about this?

Bonaventure would say telling the truth requires us to meet two conditions:

1. You have to believe what you are saying is true.
2. What you are saying actually has to be true.

We tend to find that sort of assessment harsh because it's easy to imagine cases where people honestly believe things that aren't true. I'll come back to that in a moment, but first consider the consequences of shifting all our focus to the first. Catherine honestly believes that she loves and wants to marry John. When she decides to marry him, that decision is based entirely upon her sense of her own feelings. She's certain she isn't lying when she says, "all the days of my life." Five years later, she leaves him.

How could she have avoided that lie? Looking "deeper into herself" wasn't going to help.

It is true that there are many cases where we honestly believe things that aren't true. It's also true that some lies are a simple matter of sincerity. Learning to be honest, it seems to me, is more a matter of focusing on the second condition—making sure what we say is actually true—rather than questioning our own sincerity. Which is not to say that we don't all tell bold-faced lies from time to time. Of course we do but our problem in those cases isn't figuring out whether we're telling the truth or not. The question then becomes whether the lie is justified and I think, controversially, that some lies are justified. Again, though, attempting to justify deliberately misleading someone by examining my own sense of sincerity is of no help at all.

The fact that we won't be able to prove absolutely that what we want to say is true is a feature not a bug. It reminds us that truth telling is a predictive activity. The question isn't, "Do I believe this to be true?" The question is, "How certain can I be that my claims will hold up?"