Lying

Lying, any communicative act that aims to cause receivers of the communication to adopt, or persist in, a false belief. However, because of its generality, this definition invites questions about its key terms. There is no universally accepted definition of lying. Rather, there exists a spectrum of views ranging from those that exclude most forms of deception from the category of lying to those that treat lying and deception as different words for the same phenomena.

Defining lying

Lying has been of interest for thousands of years, as is evidenced by its role in literature, theology, philosophy, and, more recently, psychology and popular culture. Philosophers from Plato (c. 428/427–c. 348/347 bce) onward have been concerned with the nature of lying—what it is that distinguishes lying from other forms of deceptive behaviour—as well as questions concerning the morality or immorality of telling lies. In contrast, psychologists have been primarily concerned with the development of the capacity for lying during childhood, our motives for lying, the incidence of lying in everyday life, and the means by which lies can be detected.

According to a paradigmatic analysis of lying, as set out by philosophers such as St. Augustine (354–430 ce), lies are statements that the speaker believes to be false and that are intended to cause the person toward whom they are directed to accept them as true. In this view, lies must be assertoric. That is, lies must be in the form of a statement, it must be the intention of the liar to cause the target to believe the content of the assertion, and it must be the case that only persons can lie or be lied to. In this view, it is not necessary that the content of the assertion really be false, only that the liar believes it to be false. Suppose that Person A falsely believes that x is true and that y is untrue but wants to convince Person B that y is true and therefore emphatically tells Person B that y is true. Person A’s claim that y is true is a lie even though y is factually true. Some theorists regard this condition as excessively strong and replace it with the weaker claim that the liar must not believe the deceptive utterance to be true—a condition that is subtly different from believing it to be untrue—in which view Person A might be agnostic about the truth of x or y and still be lying when telling Person B that y is true.

Discover how ordinary objects work, and expand your understanding of the familiar.

SIGN UP

" height="20" alt="HEW Logo">

Thank you for signing up!"

Back to homepage

By clicking "Sign Up", you consent to the Britannica Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.

A further complication is presented by examples in which the deceptive communicator utters what is believed to be true with the intention of causing the listener to disbelieve it. Suppose that Person A knows very well that x is true and tells Person B that x is true in an ironic tone of voice in order to cause Person B to falsely believe that y or z is true. Some philosophers hold that this sort of communication—sometimes described as “paltering”—ought to be considered lying, even though it does not conform to the paradigmatic definition of the latter.

Other philosophers do not believe that lying is confined to the verbal sphere. They contend that we lie when we engage in any communication (verbal or nonverbal) that is intended to induce a false belief in the person toward whom the communication is directed. This more liberal approach allows for lies of omission—misleading by refraining from asserting something—and also allows that misleading nonverbal behaviours can count as lies provided that they are deliberately undertaken with the intent to deceive. Removing one’s wedding ring so as to give the impression that one is not married would be an example of such a lie.

Expanding the definition of lying even further, other philosophers drop the requirement that lying can only be performed by persons and extend it to other living things. Biologists have known for well over a century that nonhuman organisms deceive one another. Many kinds of animals engage in deception, as do plants and even microorganisms. The mirror orchid (Ophrys speculum) produces blossoms that mimic the form and scent of the female of a species of wasp. This induces male wasps of the species to engage in pseudo-copulations with the blossoms and thereby transport pollen from flower to flower. If it is legitimate to say that mirror orchids lie to wasps, then one must dispense with the requirement that lying must be intentional as well as the requirement that lies are necessarily attempts to induce false beliefs. An orchid possesses sensory receptive capabilities far more primitive than those of a mammal, such as a human, and it is doubtful that wasps are able to form beliefs. To address these problems, an account of lying that extends to all living things posits that lies have the function—rather than intentional aim—of inducing other organisms to misinterpret—rather than form false beliefs about—some feature or features of their world.