The difference between telling the truth and lying seems obvious, but Salem Hansen says that in a philosophical analysis it may not be so cut and dry.
“I love that shirt.” Such a phrase could be a genuine compliment or a bold-faced lie, depending on the circumstance and person. When we tell the truth, we express factual thoughts and feelings. But when we lie, those false thoughts and feelings could also be accepted as facts—so what’s the difference?
Humanities Undergraduate Mentoring (HUM) Grant recipient Salem Hansen (Philosophy ’25) says that, with regards to modern communication styles in philosophical research, lying has often been left out of the conversation. So, Hansen decided to do the research personally and discovered that when you look at philosophical descriptions of speech, lying and telling the truth can be explained in the same way.
Breaking the Rules
Philosophers describe common practices in communication as speech acts. These terms include assertions, assessments, declarations, requests, offers, and promises. Approaches to classifying these acts and evaluating their effect on people vary, but Hansen has noted one tiny yet impactful flaw in all of these theories: they assume the best in people. No current literature explores how lying fits into speech at all, so as it currently stands, lying hasn’t ever been defined as a speech act.
Hansen says, “A lot of the theories that people are proposing about how language works require the assumption that everybody's working together and that they play along with a certain set of rules and conventions. I noticed that there seemed to be a really interesting gap where someone can very clearly not play by the rules and not be cooperative in their language use and still communicate by lying.”
Hansen worked closely with their HUM Grant advisor, Professor Taylor-Grey Miller (Metaphysics, Philosophy of Religion) by meeting with him nearly every week and discussing different past and current research on the topic of lying and the philosophy of language. Together they uncovered a theory for defining speech acts that does not assume that communication is done in good faith, and therefore more broadly encapsulates more forms of speech, such as lying.
What Is a Lie?
The first crucial item for Hansen to tackle was finding a concrete definition for a lie. They say, “When I initially set out for the project, I think I was expecting to have a more decisive answer on what counts as a lie and what doesn't count as a lie. And I was a surprised about how many different unique cases there are.” Hansen wrestled with categorizing things like white lies, lying in ignorance, or omitting or changing small details.
To understand what really defines a lie, Hansen says many philosophers have analyzed different types of lies through the lens of ethics—which was not the point of his project. “I'm just trying to figure out how lying works. I'm not worried about whether it's moral or ethical.”
Since Hansen has taken a different, amoral approach, they haven’t yet been able to define a lie, but this may actually work to their advantage. Hansen explains that If we can’t clearly define what makes something a lie, then we won’t be able to determine whether or not it counts as a speech act—which Hansen believes strengthens the argument that lies should not be excluded from the definition of a speech act.
Making New Rules
In their search to find a theory that could include lying as speech acts, Hansen stumbled upon something called the dialectical norms account, which defines speech acts as commitments that require proof. For example, if someone were to say that there is a table in the room, that person is now committed to providing proof of the existence of the table in the room. Hansen says, “A lie would be intentionally committing yourself to something you know you have no proof for, or you know is false. Defining a lie in this way captures what we would intuitively think of as a lie.”
The dialectical norms account removes the assumption that most other philosophical language theorists use: that everyone is working together and telling the truth. However, it also does not moralize the act of lying. Instead, the dialectical norms account merely includes it as a regular phenomenon in human interaction.
Hansen says, “I hope to have a good theory that treats all speech acts as the same. I feel like that makes the most intuitive sense. I want my theory to say: ‘Here's a bunch of different things that you could do when talking or when using language.’ And even though they accomplish different things, it would make the most sense to still have one theory that captures all of them in the same way.”
To learn more about HUM grants and how to apply for one, click here.