Novel doctrine of lying

Note: This blog post has been retracted, since I no longer think of it as a good representation of how I think about its topic. I may, or may not, have written a better post about the same topic since; check the full list of posts.

I think lying should be defined in such a way that it does not require the intent to deceive. The reason is this: take the case of someone who believes that words have different definitions from the ones that they really do. He goes on to speak his mind, but everyone misunderstands him, because he was using the words in the wrong way. I think this is better described as a case of a man who ‘inadvertently lied’ than of a man who did anything else. His act contains the core of why a lie is wrong: a misuse of words, a perversion of signs. He may be excused from the lie, just as a man may be excused who killed a man accidentally, but his act is, essentially, a lie.

Therefore, I would propose that a lie be defined in this way: “a lie is something said in such a way as to communicate something different from what the speaker believes to be true”. This means that mistakes are not lying, since they are the communication of the speaker’s honest belief, and fiction is generally not lying, since the way it is told does not communicate that the story actually happened. But also, intent is irrelevant, which I think is superior to the common doctrine.

Also, under this new definition, a speaker may be lying if he believes in a falsehood but decides to ‘deceive’ his listener by telling something different, and what he decides to say happens to be the truth; which I think everyone understands to be a true lie, belying another problem with the common definitions, which state that a lie must be a falsehood.