Some Preliminary Remarks

In a discussion of this type, an early decision any author faces is exactly where to pick up the narrative, or where, basically, the story or argument begins. In this case, I want to open with a few introductory remarks about language and the notion of truth.

An essential facet of what make us all human is our capacity to think symbolically, which then helps make possible our marvelous communicative skills. While we each use these skills in pursuit of many different communicative objectives, in order for verbal communication of any kind to occur we must have mutually recognized definitions and syntactical relationships between terms. Such definitions and relationships are based on a wider consensus within our community about facets of our language, which is necessary in order for our communicative acts to be interpretable by others. Establishing the necessary community-based meanings and syntaxes, in turn, requires some method of verification so that disputes about them can be resolved. Normally, such verification has an empirical component that permits the meanings of our terms to be tethered to sensory experiences. For example, if you and I disagree about what an utterance that sounds like "table" means, one of us can point to such an object and establish the connection. Eventually, others would come to agree with this definition of the utterance of "table," and it becomes the accepted version. Through such a process, the notion of truth, that symbolic version of the objective world favored by most members of our community, ultimately emerges.

As straightforward as such an account may seem, just what counts as "truth" is in fact a contentious philosophical question today (at least among some quarters), and as a result one does not wade into a discussion of the term without some trepidation. In order to avoid getting entangled in it, I will ask your forbearance and sidestep much of this debate so that we can cut to the heart of the important issues. In so doing, I assume that we can agree, along with Frankfurt (2006, 11), on a commonsense understanding of terms such as "truth" and "falsity." The justification for this step is that, while we may not be able to exactly define these terms, we nonetheless share a common understanding of the difference between them and routinely trade in a vocabulary that requires us to draw distinctions of certitude and truthfulness, particularly when we work in fields such as science and law. As a result, I include here only some very rough comments on the matter to show where I stand on the debate so that the overall discussion in this piece can move forward.

Obviously, "untruthfulness" and "truthfulness" are different sides of the same behavioral coin, and the recognition of one requires that we be able to distinguish it from examples of the other. Fundamentally, it is a feature of transactions between cognitively competent humans in which an understanding of the objective world is assumed or conveyed. In this discussion, untruthfulness is used to denote deceitful communicative behavior or, more simply, communicative misrepresentation. This definition is intended to distinguish such communication from that which is merely erroneous (that is, it accidentally conveys a nonstandard truth conception).

Because our definition of "untruthfulness" concerns acts that are intended to convey partial or distorted (and certainly nonstandard) conceptions of things, in theory it could be expanded to include acts that are not primarily communicative in nature, such as the failure to keep expressed or implied commitments or even to be authentic with oneself. Indeed, most of us would likely hold these kinds of actions to be another form of untruthfulness anyway. Out of fear about getting off track, however, I want to focus on what are intended to be communicative acts rather than widening the circle to include other forms of behavior.

Most commonly, the motive behind untruthfulness appears to be personal gain or the avoidance of loss. As a result, it assumes many forms. Some forms can be deflective (to avoid blame-laying for wrongdoing, such as Bill Clinton's now infamous line, "I did not have sex with that woman ...") or embellishment (when achievements or actions are portrayed in better light than they warrant); frequently, it consists of "half-truths" when some details are willfully omitted to slant the meaning being conveyed, or of flat-out hyperbole or exaggeration spun, ultimately, to influence the behavior of others. Recently, for example, we have seen several documented instances when members of Congress distorted the nature of their military service in the presence of audiences that were likely to be impressed by such service.

"Being truthful" has both ethical and epistemological components. The ethical dimension arises because the "truthful" person intends to tell the truth; one would intend to mean what one conveys and intend that what is conveyed corresponds to a generally accepted objective state of affairs in some way. Epistemological considerations arise, as well, because the agent needs to have an accurate enough understanding of things in the objective world in order to produce an acceptable and intelligible rendering of it, an assumption that raises questions about methods of inquiry. In addition, she needs to be sufficiently intellectually competent to be able to communicate what is meant. If all these conditions obtain, then others can agree that she is characterizing it accurately and apparently intends to do so. In short, she is being truthful.

Such a commonsense analysis of these distinctions offers some interesting insights. We would likely regard someone who both aspires to be factually accurate and actually succeeds at doing so as "truthful," but absent factual accuracy and in the presence of good intention she would likely just be considered to be "mistaken." The act of making factually correct utterances without the intention to do so, however, seems to have no specific lingual denotation, probably because a pattern of accidental accuracy is an unlikely outcome in the first place. Meanwhile, factual inaccuracy coupled with the intention to be factually inaccurate would in most settings likely earn a pejorative characterization (perhaps as "deception"). Given the harsher characterization of intentional versus unintentional error, the implication seems to be that we are more willing to overlook failures of analysis than deficiencies of intent (associated with the willful purveying of factual inaccuracies, in this case). That is, we seem to be saying that only purveying bad information intentionally has an unethical dimension to it.

The Costs of Untruthfulness

Why should we care whether we are truthful with each other? Other than being an irritant or annoyance to us, precisely why should untruthfulness of a neighbor or, more specifically, a...