Reducing promises to assertions

To promise something, I need to communicate something to you. What is that thing that I need to communicate to you? To a first approximation, what I need to communicate to you is that I am promising. But that’s circular: it says that promising is communicating that I am promising. This circularity is vicious, because it doesn’t distinguish promising from asking: asking is communicating that I am asking.

But now imagine I have a voice-controlled robot named Robby, and I have programmed him in such a way that I command him by asserting that Robby will do something because I have said he will do it. Thus, to get him to vacuum the living room, I assert “Robby will immediately vacuum the living room because I say so.” As long as what I say is within the range of Robby’s abilities, any statement I make in Robby’s vicinity about what he will do because I say he will do it is automatically true. This is all easily imaginable.

Now, back to promises. Perhaps it works like this. I have a limited power to control the normative sphere. This normative power generates an effect in normative space precisely when I communicate that I am generating that effect. Thus, I can promise to buy you lunch by asserting “I will be obligated to you to buy you lunch.” And I permit you to perform heart surgery by asserting “You will cease to have a duty of respect for my autonomy not to perform heart surgery on me.” As long as what I say is within my normative capabilities, by communicating that I am making it true by communicating it, I make it be true, just as Robby will do what I assert he will do because of my say-so, as long as it is within his physical capabilities.

This solves the circularity problem for promising because what I am communicating is not that I am promising, but the normative effect of the promising:

1. x promises to ϕ to y if and only if x successfully exercises a communicative normative power to gain an obligation-to-y by ϕing

2. a communicative normative power for a normative effect F is a normative power whose object is F and whose successful exercise requires the circumstance that one express that one is producing F by communicating that one is so doing.

There are probably some further tweaks to be made.

Of course, in practice, we communicate the normative effect not by describing it explicitly, but by using set phrases, contextual cues, etc.

This technique allows us to reduce promising, consenting, requesting, commanding and other illocutionary forces to normative power and communicating, which is basically a generalized version of assertion. But we cannot account for communicating or asserting in this way—if we try to do that, we do get vicious circularity.

A curious poker variant

In some games like Mafia, uttering falsehoods is a part of the game mechanic. These falsehoods are no more lies than falsehoods uttered by an actor in a performance are lies.

Now consider a variant of poker where a player is permitted to utter falsehoods when and only when they have a Joker in hand. In this case when the player utters a falsehood with Joker in hand, there is no lie. The basic communicative effect of uttering s is equivalent to asserting “s or I have a Joker in hand (or both)”, though there may be additional information conveyed by bodily expression, tone of voice, or context.

If this analysis of poker variant is correct, then the following seems to follow by analogy. Suppose, as many people think, that it is morally permissible to utter falsehoods in “assertoric contexts” to save innocent lives. (An assertoric context is roughly one where the speaker is appropriately taken to be asserting.) Given that we are always playing the “morality game”, by analogy this would mean that in paradigm instances when we utter a declarative sentence s, we are actually communicating something like “s or I am speaking to save innocent lives.” If this is right, then it is impossible to lie to save innocent lives, just as in my poker variant it is impossible to lie when one knows one has the Joker in hand (unless maybe one is really bad at logic).

The above argument supports this premise:

1. If it is morally permissible to utter falsehoods in assertoric contexts to save innocent lives, it is not possible to lie to save innocent lives.

But:

2. It is possible to lie to save innocent lives.

I conclude:

3. It is not morally permissible to utter falsehoods in assertoric contexts to save innocent lives.

In short: lying is wrong, even to save innocent lives.

Assertion, lying, promises and social contract

Suppose you have inherited a heavily-automated house with a DIY voice control system made by an eccentric relative who programmed various functions to be commanded by a variety of political statements, all of which you disagree with.

Thus, to open a living room window you need to say: “A donkey would make a better president than X”, where X is someone who you know would be significantly better at the job than any donkey.

You have a guest at home, and the air is getting very stuffy, and you feel a little nauseous. You utter “A donkey would make a better president than X” just to open a window. Did you lie to your guest? You knowingly said something that you knew would be taken as an assertion by any reasonable person. But, let us suppose, you intended your words solely as
a command to the house.

Normally, you’d clarify to your guest, ideally before issuing the voice command, that you’re not making an assertion. And if you failed to clarify, we would likely say that you lied. So simply intending the words to be a command to the house rather than an assertion to the guest may not be enough to make them be that.

Maybe we should say this:

1. You assert to Y providing (a) you utter words that you know would be taken to be an assertion to Y by a reasonable person and by Y, (b) you intend to utter these words, and (c) you failed to put reasonable effort into finding a way to clarify that you are not asserting to Y.

The conjunctive condition in (a) is a bit surprising, but i think both conjuncts need to be there. Suppose that your guest has the unreasonable belief that people typically program their home automation systems to run on political statements and rarely make political statements except to operate such systems, and hence would not take your words as an assertion. Then you don’t need to issue a clarification, even though you would be deceiving a reasonable person. Similarly, you’re not lying if you tell your home automation system “Please open the window” and your paranoid guest has the unreasonable belief that this is code for some political statement that you know to be false.

One might initially think that (c) should say that you actually failed to issue the clarification. But I think that’s not quite right. Perhaps you are feeling faint and only have strength for one sentence. You tell the home automation system to open the window, and you just don’t have the strength to to clarify to your guest that you’re not making a political statement. Then I think you haven’t lied or asserted—you made a reasonable effort by thinking about how you might clarify things, and finding no solution.

It’s interesting that condition (c) is rather morally loaded: it makes reference to reasonable effort.

Here is an interesting consequence of this loading. Similar things have to be said about promising as about asserting.

2. You promise to Y providing (a) you utter words that you know would be taken to be a promise to Y by a reasonable person and by Y, (b) you intend to utter these words, and (c) you failed to put reasonable effort into finding a way to clarify that you are not promising to Y.

If this is right, then the practice of promising might be dependent on prior moral concepts, namely the concept of reasonable effort. And if that’s right, then contract-based theories of morality are viciously circular: we cannot explain what promises are without making reference to moral concepts.

Blurting

It is commonly thought that to engage in a speech of a particular sort—assertion, request, etc.—one needs to intend to do so.

But suppose you ask me a question, and I unintentionally blurt out an answer, even though the matter is confidential. Can you correctly tell people that I answered your question, that I asserted whatever it was that I blurted out?

If yes, then one does not need to intend to engage in a speech act of a particular sort in order for that speech act to occur.

But I suspect the that in unintentionally blurting one does not answer or assert. One reason is that if one was answering or asserting, then it seems that one could also unintentionally blurt out a lie. (Imagine that you have a habit of answering a certain question with a falsehood, and you blurt out a falsehood purely out of habit.) But I don’t think a lie can be unintentional.

Moreover, if someone asserts, then what they say is presented for trust. But what is said unintentionally is not presented for trust.

I am not very confident of the above.

Asserting without intending to

Intention seems essential to assertion. Thus, it seems that a necessary condition for assertion is an intention condition like:

1. I intended my utterance u to be an assertion to you.

But this is false. Suppose that I have promised to mail you my report on some matter. But now it has turned out that the matter is such that I want to keep it secret from you. I don’t want to lie or break my promise. So I identify the world’s least reliable postal service, determine that there is only a 15% chance that mail from there will get through, fly to that country, and mail my report. My promise is (legalistically) kept, and yet there is a 85% chance that the secret is safe. But, alas, the mail gets through. The contents of the report have, thus, been asserted to you. But if the report had not got through, then I wouldn’t have asserted the contents, and since that was my plan, I didn’t intend to assert.

The only solution I have is clunky. We might say that there are multiple necessary conditions for assertion. One is the intention condition, which we are right now trying to get clear on. Another is a transmission condition, namely that the assertion “get to you”. I am not quite sure what is required for that. The paradigmatic case is when you “hear the assertion as an assertion”. But what about edge cases, like when you speak to me, and I am distracted and don’t process it, or it’s in a letter which I tear up without reading? I am inclined to think that that could be an assertion. But not if I am in the next room and the noise level is such that any reasonable person would know I wouldn’t hear it, or if the letter was lost in the mail before “getting to me”.

It now seems like the intention condition for assertion would be something conditional like:

2. I intended that if u satisfied the transmission condition on assertion to you, then u was an assertion to you.

All that said, while (2) may be true, it can’t be a part of the definition of assertion, since it uses “assertion” in the definiens.

A near lie

Alice knows that her friend Bob has no pets and no experience with birds. While recommending Bob for a birdkeeping job at a zoo and having discovered or to be surprisingly ignorant about birds, she says:

1. Bob has a fine collection of Southern yellow-beaked triggles.

It seems that Alice is lying. Yet it seems that to lie one must assert, and to assert one must express a proposition. But Alice’s sentence does not express a proposition since “triggle” is meaningless.

Sentence (1) seems to entail the falsehood:

2. Bob owns some birds.

But entailment is a relation between propositions, and (1) neither is nor expresses a proposition. We might want to say that if it did express a proposition, it would express a proposition entailing (2). But even that isn’t so clear. After all, maybe a world where “triggle” denotes a science-fictional beaked reptile is closer than a world where it denotes a kind of bird (imagine that some science-fiction writer almost wrote Southern yellow-beaked triggles as reptiles into a story but stopped themselves at the last moment).

Here is what I think I want to say about what Alice did. According to Jorge Garcia, what makes lying bad one linguistically solicits trust that what one is saying is true, while at the same time betraying that trust. Alice did exactly that, but without asserting. So, while Alice did not lie, she did something that is wrong for the same reason that lying is.

The Grotius view of lying

Grotius had a weird view: it is never permissible to lie, but “for purposes of natural law”, only assertions to people who had a right to the truth were lies. Nazis at the door, he would have said, have no right to the truth, so one isn’t lying when one asserts known falsehoods to them. This view has always seemed clearly wrong.

But I just realized that there is actually an interesting argument for a very similar view. Start with these three principles:

1. Every lie is an assertion.

2. A defining feature of an assertion is that it is the sort of speech act that the sincerity norm (e.g., “Don’t say what you think is false!”) applies to.

3. No norm applies in contravention of unequivocal moral norms.

Premise (1) is clearly true. Premise (2) is part and parcel of normative accounts of assertion (there is room for variance on what the sincerity norm exactly is, but that variance will not affect our main argument).

Premise (3) is highly controversial. It is a generalization of Aquinas’ principle that immoral “laws” are not really laws. The general idea is that morality not only overrides other norms that contradict it, but as it were sucks all the power out of them. When one knows that ϕing is morally forbidden, responses like “But the law of the land requires it” or “I’d be breaking the rules of the game if I ϕed” make no sense. For there is no normative force against morality. Here are two reasons to accept premise (3). The first is the controversial claim that all norms of action are a species of moral norms. (Here is a theistic argument for this: Norms are appropriately action-guiding; the only thing that can appropriately guide our action is what the love of God requires (we are to love God with all our heart); but to be guided by the love of God and to be guided by morality is the same thing.) The second is that if there are norms other than moral norms, they are created by our normative powers, but it is not plausible that we have the normative power to create norms that stand against the norms of morality (that is, for instance, why immoral promises are null and void).

Then:

4. If the sincerity norm for a speech act ϕ contravenes unequivocal moral norms, the speech act is not an assertion. (By 2 and 3)

5. If the sincerity norm for a speech act ϕ contravenes unequivocal moral norms, the speech act is not a lie. (By 1 and 4)

Now here is one way to fill out the rest of the argument:

6. In Nazi at the door cases, we are morally required to say what we disbelieve (i.e., go against what the sincerity norm would require).

7. So, in Nazi at the door cases, saying what we disbelieve is not a lie. (By 5 an 6)

And that gives us a version of the Grotius view.

My own view is to flip the last two steps of the argument, replacing 6 and 7 with:

8. In Nazi at the door cases, saying what we disbelieve is a lie.

9. So, in Nazi at the door cases it is still false that we are morally required to say what we disbelieve. (By 5 and 8)

10. In Nazi at the door cases, if it is morally permissible to say what we disbelieve, it is morally required.

11. So, in Nazi at the door cases, it is not morally permissible to say what we disbelieve. (By 9 and 10)

But a lot of people balk at 9. And they then have reason to accept the Grotius-like thesis 7.

So, all in all, if one accepts the normative view of assertion and one accepts the contravention principle 3, one has a choice between Kantian absolutism about lying and a Grotius-like view.

Sincerity and promises

It seems that for a promise to be sincere, you have to intend to keep it.

But this is false. Suppose you offer to lend me a microscope upon my promise to return it to you when you ask. I know that if I make the promise, then as soon as you ask me for the microscope’s return, your request will remind me of the promise, and I will fulfill it. So, I make the promise. Given that I know I will keep it, I am being sincere. But I don’t need to clutter my mind by forming any intention to keep the promise or to return the microscope.

So perhaps for a promise to be sincere, you need to believe you will keep it.

But this, too, is false. Suppose you’re my accountability partner and I promise to stop drinking, and suppose this is a promise I have broken so many times that I believe that I won’t keep it. But I intend to keep it. And you know my track record, so there is no deception. Again, I think there is no sincerity.

But if sincerity in promising needs neither the intention to keep the promise nor the belief that one will do so, what does it need? Perhaps the disjunction: I need to believe or intend (or, best, both). But normally I prefer to avoid disjunctive accounts.

Let’s think some more and go back to the accountability partner case. If you know my track record, you won’t count on my not drinking. For instance, you aren’t going to vouch for my sobriety to others, you won’t trust me around your liquor cabinet, etc. But suppose you didn’t know my track record. You just heard my promise and counted on it, vouching for me to others, etc. In that case, if I drink, you have two grounds for resentment: that I broke my promise and that I deceived you, leading you to count on good behavior I did not actually expect.

Here is what I think is going on. Normally, when I make you a promise, I do two things:

1. I obligate myself to you to perform the action, and

2. I testify to you that I will perform the action.

And I can betray you in either or both respects: I can break my obligation and I can testify falsely.

In the accountability partner case, in the presence of shared knowledge of my track record, the testimony about future behavior that normally comes along with a promise is canceled. In that case, all I do is I obligate myself to you. I expect to break that obligation, but I have good reason to undertake the obligation, namely that the probability that I will stay sober increases (though not enough to justify belief) because I will have an additional reason—my promise to you—to do so. (I think one needs the Principle of Double Effect here. My intended effect is an increased chance of staying sober. The unintended—indeed, counterintended—but foreseen effect is my breaking a promise to you.)

That still doesn’t answer the question of what the sincerity conditions are.

Here is one suggestion. Sincerity only concerns (2), the testimony aspect. In cases where the testimony is canceled, whether explicitly or implicitly (say, in light of shared knowledge), there is no sincerity condition on promising at all. There is only the creation of an obligation.

That doesn’t sound quite right. It seems that if I make a promise to an accountability partner who knows the dismal track record of such promises, I am still being insincere if I don’t intend to keep the promise. But what if the case is really weird, so that I am more likely to keep the promise if I don’t intend to do so when making it? (E.g., maybe I know that there is a neuroscientist who is going to observe my brain and if she detects that I am intending to keep the promise at the moment of making it, she will erase my memory of the promise, while if I don’t intend to keep it, the promise will still come to mind in my moments of temptation and make it less unlikely that I will stay sober.)

Maybe what is going on is this. When the testimony to future performance is canceled, it is normally replaced by an implicit testimony to the intention of future performance (or perhaps an implicature of such an intention?). So in the special case of promises to accountability partners who expect failure, one is deceiving the other party if one lacks the intention to keep the promise. And in the contrived cases where the intention would make it less likely that one would keep the promise, one should take the further step of informing the other party that one is not even intending to keep the promise.

I like the way that this story makes the accountability partner case be different from the standard case of a promise. I also like the modularity on this story. Promises normally have two ingredients, the exercise of a normative power to create an obligation, and testimony to future actions. We already knew that the second ingredient can occur without the first—mere predictions of one’s future actions are like that. It’s rather nice, then, that the first ingredient can also occur without the second.

I don’t know if the above story can be reconciled with the promise account of assertion. If not, so much the worse for the promise account of assertion.

Divine speech acts and classical theism

Here is a question I have wondered about and have never heard or seen much discussion of:

1. What does it mean to say that God engaged in some speech act, such as commanding or asserting?

The more anthropomorphic one’s theism, the easier the question can be answered, because the closer the analogy between divine speech acts and ours. But the setting that interests me here is classical theism (both because it’s the truth theory of God and because it’s more challenging). In particular, let’s take on board divine immutability and simplicity.

Let’s think about the human case first. We’re going to have to pay close attention to such factors as intention and context. Thus, the same words in the same tone are an assertion in an ordinary conversation but not an assertion when spoken on a stage. The same handwritten sentence can be a command in one case and in another can be a handwriting exercise. Theorists will differ as to the balance between intention and context in the correct theory. But I think it is easy to argue that an important part of the distinction between assertion and play-acting or between command and handwriting exercise will be constituted by intentions. For instance, it is not simply being on a stage that makes one’s words not be assertions. The actor on stage can yell “Fire!” upon seeing the flames licking the back of the room, and that will be an assertion—even if that word happens to be exactly what the script calls for at this time. (It may be an assertion that is not taken up, though, much as an assertion might not be heard in a loud rooom.)

Very roughly speaking, to engage in a speech act of kind K, one has to form the intention to be taken by one’s audience as engaging in a speech act of kind K.

Now, there are natural rock formations that look like faces. Suppose that somewhere in the solar system there is a natural rock formation that spells out “God exists”, and one day an English speaking astronaut comes across it. Is it an assertion by God?

It is certainly something made by God. For God made everything other than himself. But did God make it with the intention that it be taken as an assertion? Or is it just a formation of rocks intended for some other purpose than to be taken as an assertion? (Presumably, it’s not a handwriting exercise, since God doesn’t need to practice being already perfect.)

On more anthropomorphic theisms, there is no special problem here about the God case. God can form the intention to make an assertion just as a human being can or, just as a human being, he can fail to form that intention. But if divine simplicity is correct, then there are no contingent intrinsic divine properties. There is just God. Any contingency is on the side of creation. In particular, there cannot be two worlds that are exactly alike except with respect to divine intentions intrinsic to God. Divine intentions must supervene on creation and on necessary truths about God. But what contingent facts about creation and necessary truths about God can make it be that the rock formation is or is not a divine assertion?

One might try to make use of divine reasons. I have argued that divine simplicity entails divine omnirationality: whenever God does something, he does it for all the good reasons there are for doing it, rather than choosing which of the good reasons to act on. Now, suppose that in fact the astronaut’s faith in God is strengthened by the rock formation. That’s a good thing. Goods provide reasons. So, God has a good reason to make the rock formation in order to strengthen the astronaut’s faith. But the astronaut’s faith is presumably strengthened by her taking the formation as a divine assertion. So, God has a reason to have the astronaut take the formation as a divine assertion. And, thus, by omnirationality, God is acting on that reason, and the rock formation is an assertion.

But take a variant case. Our astronaut lands on a planet with a rock formation that says “Kneel!” But, now, kneeling is both good and bad for the astronaut. Perhaps it is spiritually good but physically bad, because our astronaut has bad knees. The astronaut takes it as a command. That’s a good and a bad thing: she kneels, hurts her knees, and the mission is in jeopardy. But she spent a few minutes in prayer, and that was good for her. And, in fact, in a complex world there will generally be pluses and minuses of anything. Even in the case of the “God exists!” rock formation, there is some benefit to believing without such overt signs, perhaps a greater maturity of faith.

We could try to make the intention condition work something like this: God counts as intending that something assertion-like or command-like (structured symbolically in the right way) be taken as an assertion or command provided it’s good in some way that it be taken as such. But that seems overbroad. Or we could say it’s an assertion or command provided it’s good on balance that it be taken as such. But when we are dealing with incommensurable values, there may be no “on balance”. These objections aren’t fatal: but they point to a need to do serious philosophical work here.

Here is a possible different solution. We don’t need to advert to speaker intentions in every case to figure out whether something is a speech act of the right sort. When yelled from the stage, we may need to know whether “Fire!” is intended as a warning or as part of the script. But when yelled from the seats, there is no reasonable doubt. There are contexts where no reasonable person in the relevant audience would fail to take something as a certain kind of speech act. You come across the Summa Theologica in a heath. Of course, it’s a speech act, of whatever sort a theological discourse is (a series of arguments and assertions). Every reasonable person who knew the language (that’s perhaps the relevant audience component) would take it as such.

Perhaps we can now say this:

2. In contexts where every reasonable person in the relevant audience who knew the relevant context sufficiently well would take something to be a divine speech act of a certain kind, it is a primary case of a divine speech act of that kind.

For primary divine speech acts, we need some kind of reasonable luminosity: they need to be the sort of thing that one couldn’t reasonably doubt to be divine speech acts if one knew the relevant circumstances. Perhaps God builds into our nature an ability to recognize divine speech acts.

And then we have derivative cases of divine speech acts, which are when the initial audience is enlarged by means of the members of the initial audience becoming heralds of the message, and the process continues. When the herald is being faithful to the message, what the herald says counts as a speech act of the original speaker. So, the heralds pass on the word of God. And since the heralds are human, their intentions are relevant and raise no deep ontological concerns.

This story would lead to a rather restrictive view of divine speech acts. The rock formations, in a vast universe, could be reasonably doubted. So they aren’t primary divine speech acts. The primary divine speech acts may, rather, be more like cases of prophecy, where God makes it reasonably impossible for the prophet to doubt what kind of a speech act it is.

I am not very happy with any of the stories above. This is just a vague and inchoate start. I don’t really want to finish off this task. It would make a really interesting philosophical theology dissertation, though.

Lying and normative views of assertion

I find some version of the following normative partial analysis of assertion very plausible:

1. At least a part of what makes a speech act an assertion of p is that it is the kind of speech act that should not be made if one believes p to be false.

But now:

2. If it is sometimes permissible to lie, it is sometimes obligatory to lie.

Why? Well, people’s main intuitions that it is sometimes permissible to lie are driven by cases—such as the murderer at the door—where they think it is obligatory to lie. Moreover, if an action is permissible, then typically it becomes obligatory when there is enough at stake. Thus, if it’s permissible to eat meat, it’s obligatory to eat meat when doing so is necessary to save an innocent life (e.g., an evildoer says: “Eat this burger or this innocent dies”).

Thus, to argue that lying is never permissible I just need to argue that it is never obligatory.

Now here is a flatfooted argument against lying ever being obligatory. If lying is ever obligatory, then sometimes one should assert that p when one believes p to be false. But that contradicts (1).

Of course, this is a bad argument, for two reasons. The first is that perhaps all the argument shows is that there is a real dilemma sometimes: one should lie and one shouldn’t lie. The second, and more serious, is that the norms in (1) and (2) are different: the norm in (1) is a social norm of assertion, while that in (2) is a moral norm.

However, the argument can be fixed to get around both problems. For morality is overriding in the following strong way:

3. A non-moral norm is null and void insofar as it requires what is morally forbidden.

E.g., a law requiring an immoral action is just a piece of paper with no normative force. But this means that a norm of assertion that forbids one from a speech act under circumstances in which in which that speech act is morally required is null and void under those circumstances. But a null and void norm is no norm at all and generates no “should” of the action-guiding sort. And the “should” in (1) is of the action-guiding sort. And hence the idea that sometimes lying is morally obligatory contradicts (1) precisely when we understand the “should” in (1) as expressive of an action-guiding non-moral norm.

Here’s another way to show the intuition behind the argument. The normative picture of language nicely fits with the following modified Wittgensteinian picture of language: The meaning of language comes from its normative use. But if lying is permissible, then a norm-abiding speaker of English will say “Bob is not at home” when asked by someone at the door who wants to murder Bob. Thus, the norm-abiding use of “Bob is not at home” will fail to distinguish between two candidate norms:

4. Say “Bob is not at home” only when you believe Bob is not at home.

5. Say “Bob is not at home” only when you believe that either Bob is not at home or the interlocutor wants to murder Bob.

And hence it will not be possible to read the meaning of “Bob is not at home” from its norm-abiding usage.

The argument works with minor modifications if we replace the belief norm by a truth norm, a knowledge norm or a justified belief norm.

I do, however, have a serious objection to the argument. The argument as it stands only works when the norm of assertion is of an action-guiding sort. But norms of assertion could be a different critter altogether: they could be Aristotelian teleological norms. These aren’t norms that say, at least directly, what is or is not to be done. Rather, they are norms that say what is or is not defective. Thus, a broken leg is defective, but it is, of course, a category mistake to say that a broken leg is something not to be done (and it’s a moral mistake to say that a broken leg is something not to be produced: there are times when it is obligatory to break a leg, say in the defense of the innocent). Thus, it could be that what (1) says is that a part of what makes a speech act be an assertion of p is that it is a speech act that would be defective should p turn out to be false.

I do not know how satisfactory this reading of (1) is. It seems to me that we think of the norms of assertion as something that persons are criticizable for failing to meet in a way in which no one is criticizable for having a broken leg (though one might be criticizable for breaking one’s leg).

More on fake assertions

In my previous post I argued that if Bob writes and posts a letter of recommendation for himself purporting to be from Alice, and saying all sorts of false stuff like that Bob is very honest, then the contents of the letter are not asserted by Bob, and hence while they are deceptions—and, obviously, immoral—they are not lies.

Here are some more cases that I think support this. In all of the stories, I assume Alice is honest and well-informed.

1. Bob has deceived Alice into thinking that he is actually very honest. She writes him a letter of recommendation asserting this, and Bob reads the letter (e.g., by steaming open the envelope) and mails it to the potential employer.

2. Bob breaks into Alice’s office and finds a letter of recommendation for another guy—a really honest guy—with the same name as Bob. He sends the letter in support of his job application.

3. After an accident, Alice has been engaging in handwriting exercises by writing joke letters of recommendation. One of these joke letters is a letter of recommendation for Stalin as a kindergarten teacher, praising his compassion, and another is a letter for Bob as a bank teller, praising his honesty. Bob breaks into Alice’s office, finds the letter for him. He knows full well it is a joke, since he knows what Alice actually thinks of him, but he posts the letter in support of his job application.

4. Bob has a bunch of monkeys employed randomly typing on typewriters. One day, a monkey produces a letter praising Bob’s honesty and purporting be from Alice. He sends the letter as part of his job application.

5. Bob obtains a letter of recommendation from Alice where one line ends with “Bob is utterly dis-” and the next line begins with “honest.” He carefully erases the “dis-” and posts the letter in support of his job application.

6. The original case where Bob fakes the entire letter.

Case 1: There is no lie in the letter, and nothing in the letter is asserted by Bob. Bob is still being deceitful by knowingly mailing a letter containing false information about him, which false information comes from his deceit of Alice. But there is no lie in the letter.

Case 2: Alice asserts truths in the letter. Bob manipulates the reader into thinking that the letter is about him, which it is not. The reader misunderstands the letter as about Bob. But the one person doing any asserting in the letter is Alice, who cannot be said to be asserting falsehoods.

Case 3: Alice neither asserts that Stalin is compassionate nor that Bob is honest. She is just joking and jokes aren’t assertions. Bob manipulates the reader into misunderstanding the jokes as assertions. No one does any asserting in the letter, certainly not Alice, but also not Bob.

Case 4: This one is a little bit trickier, but in the end it’s hard to see a difference between case 3 and case 4. In both cases, the writer of the letter made no assertions. And Bob just posted it.

Case 5: Here things are, I think, even a little bit murkier. But imagine a version of case 5 where Bob sees his pet monkey playing with an eraser and erasing the “dis-”, and then he posts the letter. In that case, this is just like case 4 with respect to Bob’s authorship, and hence Bob is not lying in the letter. But I also don’t think it matters whether Bob physically does the erasing himself or the monkey does it with Bob’s knowledge. Bob isn’t lying in the letter.

I could imagine someone caviling at my judgment in case 5, so let’s go back to case 4 some more.

Imagine that Bob has all the time in the world on his hands, and he has hired a bunch of monkeys as secretarial staff. Whenever he wants to write a letter, he composes it is in his mind, and then waits for the monkeys to type exactly it at random. When they do so, he posts the letter. This is just an inefficient way of writing letters: the letter is just as fully from Bob as it would be if he typed it himself. If the letter is signed “Bob” and contains claims that Bob knows to be false, Bob is lying in the letter. But note that if the letter is signed “Alice”, this is just case 4, and in case 4, Bob isn’t lying in the letter. So, it looks like whether Bob is or is not lying in the letter depends on whether it purports to be from him, and hence in cases 5 and 6, Bob isn’t lying in the letter either.

Let me push a bit further. Go back to case 1, which was perhaps the clearest case of Bob’s not lying in the letter. Imagine that Bob has the following inefficient technique for avoiding doing any typing himself. When he wants to write a particular letter purporting to be from himself, he finds another person with the same name as his own, and he manipulates them into believing the content of the letter, and then puts them in circumstances where the other person has a reason to honestly write such a letter. He then steals the letter and posts it as if it were his own. This seems, once again, to be a case of an inefficient letter composition procedure, and Bob is the author of the letter, just as much as he would be if he waited for a monkey to type it at random or if he trained a monkey to write it. Yet the main difference between this and case 1 is that in case 1, Bob isn’t purporting the letter to be from himself, but from Alice, which it in fact is. So, if we grant, as I think we have to, that Bob isn’t lying in the letter in case 1, but that he would be if he used the inefficient secretarial technique of manipulating namesakes into writing letters just like the ones he wants, then we have to say that what makes the difference as to whether Bob is lying in a letter that he fully approves of despite knowing it contains falsehoods is whether the letter purports to be from Bob.

We can make similar points about some of the other cases. For instance, suppose we agree that there is no lie in the joke letter in case 3. But we can imagine Bob having an inefficient secretarial technique where letters from him are written by getting lots of people to do handwriting exercises until one of them writes something signed “Bob” that has the exact content he wants it to have. In that case, Bob is lying in the letter, if the letter has falsehoods.

If this is right, then lies are tightly connected to a personal endorsement of a claim. If instead of personally endorsing a claim one fakes an endorsement by someone else, one is engaging in deceit but one isn’t lying.

Fake assertions

Suppose Bob faked a letter of recommendation from his dissertation director Alice, in which letter lots of stuff was said which Bob knew to be false, and then posted the letter to Carl.

Bob clearly deceived Carl, or tried to. But did he lie to Carl? Let’s consider three representative example sentences from the letter:

1. I am Bob’s dissertation director.

2. I think the world of Bob.

3. Bob is impeccably honest.

I will also take that Bob knows that Alice is his dissertation director, that Alice thinks poorly of him (which is why he faked the letter) and that he’s dishonest, and I will also assume that Bob thinks the world of himself.

If Bob lied, which of these sentences did he lie in?

One important question is who “I” refers to in the letter. If it refers to Bob, then (1) and (3) are false and (2) is true. If it refers to Alice, then (2) and (3) are false and (1) is true. Basically, we need to decide which of (1) and (2) is true.

It seems clear that by (2), Bob intended to communicate that Alice thinks the world of him, and he had no intention at all to communicate that Bob thinks the world of himself (indeed, perhaps another sentence in the letter is “I have never met a humbler person”). So it seems that “I” refers to Alice, and hence (2) and (3) are false, but (1) is true.

On this reading, Bob has knowingly written two false things: (2) and (3), and one truth: (1). Has Bob lied in the false things he wrote? I have some doubts. The reason is this. What makes lying be lying is that one is betraying a trust that one has solicited in speaking. But Bob has not solicited Carl’s trust in Bob: rather, he is relying on Carl’s trust in Alice. But one can only betray trust in oneself. So Bob cannot betray Carl’s trust in Alice, and hence Bob is not lying when Alice is the object of Carl’s trust. Here’s another way to think about this: To lie is to stand behind a falsehood. But Bob isn’t standing behind the falsehood—he is, instead, putting Alice in front of it, as is clear from the fact that “I” refers to Alice.

In asserting something one implicates that one believes it. But Bob isn’t implicating that he believes it, only that Alice does. And it’s not, it seems, that Bob has canceled the implicature of belief (as one sometimes can, pace Moore). I think Bob not only isn’t lying, but he isn’t asserting anything.

This seems paradoxical. But consider this. Suppose Drew, who is dishonest but not a racist, fakes an open letter from Adolf Hitler, hoping to sell it off to the Holocaust Museum.. The letter contains all sorts of false statements, such as that various minority groups are subhuman. Drew is clearly committing fraud. But is he making racist statements? I don’t think so. Rather, he is faking racist statements by Hitler. Similarly, the falsehoods in the letter are not lies by Drew, for if Drew were lying in the letter, he would be making racist statements. But he is faking, not making, racist statements.

I think the same may be true of Bob: he is faking, not making, various assertions in the letter. There is a difference between Bob and Drew, of course. Drew is not trying to get the audience to believe the fake assertions, but only to believe that they were made. Bob is trying to get the audience to believe the fake assertions. But this difference aside, I still suspect that Bob is deceiving, not lying.

Of course, this difference doesn’t let Bob or Drew off the hook. They have engaged in a massive failure of integrity, indeed in fraud.

But the difference between deceiving and lying could still be relevant. I think a challenge for those of us who think lying is always wrong is to articulate some sort of a theory of clandestine military and police operations that allows for non-lying deceit. If lies require that the liar be taken to be the author, then this opens up the way for various things like Operation Mincemeat being deceit but not lies.

I fear, however, that at this point I am engaging in the kind of casuistry that gives casuistry a bad name. Here is one way of highlighting this. Surely one can’t just write a letter with falsehoods putatively from oneself and claim that one faked one’s own letter, and hence one didn’t lie in it. But now imagine that Alice and Bob conspire to each write a fake letter purporting to be from the other. Surely that shouldn’t escape the moral prohibitions against lying. Maybe, though, it depends on the details of the conspiracy. If Bob is just writing in the letter putatively from Alice things that Alice asked him to write, then the letter is no fake, and Bob is just Alice’s secretary.

The present king of Ruritania

Suppose I am a quack and I announce:

1. These green pills cured the king of Ruritania of lung cancer.

I am lying, of course. The green pills never cured anyone of lung cancer.

But wait. To lie, I have to assert. To assert, there has to be a proposition that is being expressed. But (1) doesn’t express any proposition, because “Ruritania” is a non-referring name.

Maybe, then, (1) is not a lie, but something that is wrong for the same reason that a lie is wrong. For instance, on Jorge Garcia’s account, lying is wrong as it’s a betrayal of the trust solicited by the very same act. If so, then my pretend assertion of (1) might be wrong for exactly the same reason as a lie.

The point can also be made without relying on non-referring proper names. Suppose Jones has lied, cheated, stolen, plagiarized and defenestrated his friends, but reporting doesn’t make his character black enough for my purposes. So I say:

2. Dr. Jones has lied, cheated, stolen, plagiarized, defenestrated his enemies, and garobulated his friends.

This doesn’t express a proposition. But it’s just as bad as a lie.

Assertion threshold

Some people like me assert things starting with a credence like 0.95. Other people are more restrictive and only assert at a higher credence, say 0.98. Is there a general fact as to what credence one should assert at? I am not sure. It seems to me that this is an area where decent and reasonable people can differ, within some range (no one should assert at 0.55, and no one should refuse to assert at 0.999999999). Maybe what is going on here is that there is an idiolect-like phenomenon at the level of illocutionary force. And somehow we get by with these different idiolects, but with some inductive heuristics like “Alice only speaks when she is quite sure”.

The reportable and the assertible

I’ve just had a long conversation with a grad student about (inter alia) reporting and asserting. My first thought was that asserting is a special case of reporting, but one can report without asserting. For instance, I might have a graduate assistant write a report on some aspect of the graduate program, and then I could sign and submit that report without reading it. I would then be reporting various things (whether responsibly so would depend on how strong my reasons to trust the student were), but it doesn’t seem right to say that I would be asserting these things.

But then I came to think that just as one can report without asserting, one can assert without reporting. For instance, there is no problem with asserting facts about the future, such as that the sun will rise tomorrow. But I can’t report such facts, even though I know them.

It’s not really a question of time. For (a) I also cannot report that the sun rose a million years ago, and (b) if I were to time-travel to the future, observe the sunrise, and come back, then I could report that the sun will rise tomorrow.

And it’s not a distinction with respect to the quantity of evidence. After all, I can legitimately report what I had for dinner yesterday, but it’s not likely that I have as good evidence about that as I do that the sun will rise tomorrow.

I suspect it’s a distinction as to the kind of evidence that is involved. I am a legally bound reporter of illegal activity on campus. But I can’t appropriately report that a violation of liquor laws occurred in the dorms over the weekend if I know it only on the basis of the general claim that such violations, surely, occur every weekend. The kind of evidence that memory provides is typically appropriate for reporting, while the kind of evidence that induction provides is at least typically not.

Interestingly, although I can’t appropriately report that tomorrow the sun will rise, I can appropriately report that I know that the sun will rise tomorrow. This means that the reportable is not closed under obvious entailment.

Justification and units of assertion

It’s clear to me that each of two assertions could individually meet the evidential bar for assertibility, but that their conjunction, being typically less probable than either conjucnt, might not. But then there is something very strange about the idea that one could justifiably assert “S₁. S₂.” but not “S₁ and S₂.” After all, is there really a difference in what one is saying when one inserts a period and when one inserts an “and”?

Perhaps the thing to say is that the units of assertion are in practice not single sentences, but larger units. How large? Well, not whole books. Plainly, as the preface paradox notes, one can be justified in producing a book while thinking there is an error somewhere in it (as long as one does not know where the error lies). I think not whole articles, either. Again, we expect to be mistaken somewhere in a complex article. Perhaps the unit of assertion is something more of the order of a paragraph or less, but more than a sentence.

If so, then in typical cases “S₁. S₂.” will be a single unit of assertion, and to be justified in asserting the unit, one needs to be justified in the conjunction. This gives us a pretty precise definition of a unit of assertion: a unit of assertion is an assertoric locution that is lengthwise maximal with respect to needing to be justified.

What in practice determines the unit of assertion is probably determined by a mix of content, context, intonation, length of pauses, etc. For instance, a topic switch is apt to end a unit of assertion, and it may sometimes make a difference how long the pause between the sentences in “S₁. S₂.” with respect to whether the sentences form a single unit of assertion.

Surely people have written on this.

GPS signals, normativity and the morality of lying

I will argue that lying is never permissible. The argument is a curious argument, maybe Kantian in flavor, which attempts to establish the conclusion without actually adverting to any explanation of what is bad about lying.

GPS satellites constantly broadcast messages that precisely specify the time at which the message is sent together with precise data as to the satellite orbit. Comparing receipt times of message from multiple GPS satellites with the positions of the satellites, a GPS receiver can calculate its position.

A part of the current design specifications of US GPS satellites is apparently that they can regionally degrade the signal in wartime in order to prevent enemies from making use of the signal (US military receivers can presumably circumvent the degradation).

Now, let’s oversimplify the situation and make up some details (the actual GPS signal specifications are here and the points I am making don’t match the actual specifications), since my point is philosophy of language, not GPS engineering. So I’m really talking about GPS satellites in another possible world.

Suppose that normally the satellite is broadcasting the time n in picoseconds up to a precision of plus or minus ten picoseconds, and suppose that currently we receive a message of n in the time field from a satellite. What does that message mean?

First of all, the message does not mean that the current time is n picoseconds. For the design specifications, I have stipulated, are that there is a precision of plus or minus ten picoseconds. Thus, what it means is something more like:

1. The current time is n ± 10 ps, i.e., is within 10 ps of n ps.

But now suppose that it is a part of the design and operation specifications that in wartime the locally relevant satellites add a pseudorandom error of plus or minus up to a million picoseconds (remember that I’m making this up). Then what the message field means is something like:

2. Either (a) this is a satellite that is relevant to a war region, the current time is n ± 10⁶ ps and [extra information available to the military], or (b) the current time is n ± 10 ps.

In particular, when wartime signal degradation happens, the time field of the GPS message is (assuming the satellite is working properly) still conveying correct information—the satellite isn’t lying. For the semantic content of the time field supervenes on the norms in the design and operation specifications, and if these norms specify that wartime degradation occurs, then that possibility becomes a part of the content of the message.

Suppose lying is sometimes morally obligatory. Thus, there will be a sentence “s” and circumstances C_s in which it is both true that s and morally required to say that not s. Suppose Alice is uttering “Not s” in an assertoric way. Morality is part of Alice’s (and any other human being’s) “design and operation specifications”. Thus on the model of my analysis (2) of the semantic content of the (fictionalized) time field of the GPS message, what is being stated or asserted by Alice is not simply:

3. Not s

but rather:

4. Either (a) C_s obtains, or (b) not s.

But if that’s the content of Alice’s statement, then Alice is not actually lying when she says “Not s” in C_s. And the same point goes through even if Alice isn’t obligated but is merely permitted to say “Not s” in C_s. The norms in her design and operation specifications make (4) be the content of her statement rather than (3).

In other words:

5. If lying that s is obligatory or permissible in C_s, then lying is actually impossible in C_s.

But the consequent of (5) is clearly false. Thus, the antecedent is false. And hence:

6. Lying is never obligatory or permissible.

Note that a crucial ingredient in my GPS story is that the norms governing the degradation of GPS messages are in some way public. If these norms were secret, then the military would be making the GPS satellites do something akin to lying when they degraded their messages. But moral norms are essentially public.

Objection 1: The norms relevant to the determination of the content of a statement are not moral but linguistic norms. The moral norms require that Alice utter “Not s” in an assertoric way only when (4) obtains. But the linguistic norms require that Alice utter “Not s” in an assertoric way only when (3) obtains. And hence (3) is the content of “Not s”, not (4).

Response: This is a powerful objection. But compare the GPS case. We could try to distinguish narrowly technical norms of satellite operation from the larger norms on which GPS satellites are controlled by the US military in support of military aims. That would lead to the thought that the time field of the satellite (on my fictionalized version of the story) would mean (1). But I think it is pretty compelling that the time field of the satellite would mean (2). The meaning of the message needs to be determined according to the overall norms of design and operation, not some narrow technical subset of the specifications. Similarly, the meaning of a linguistic performance needs to be determined according to the overall norms of design and operation of the human being engaging in the performance. And it is precisely the moral norms that are such overall norms.

Second, linguistic norms are norms of voluntary behavior, since linguistic performance is a form of voluntary behavior. But a norm of voluntary behavior that conflicts with morality is null and void insofar as it conflicts, much as an illegal order is no order and an unconstitutional law is no law.

Third, on a view on which linguistic norms have the kind of independence from moral norms that the objection requires, it is difficult to specify what makes them linguistic. For we cannot simply say that they are the overall norms governing linguistic behavior. Moral norms do that, as well. A distinction like the one in the objection would make sense in the case of something where the rules are formalized. Thus, there are circumstances when the rules of chess require one to do something immoral. (For instance, suppose that a tyrant tells you she will kill an innocent unless you move a pawn forward by three squares. The rules of chess require you to refrain from doing that, but it is immoral for you to refrain from it.) But the rules of chess are simply a well-defined set of statements about what constitutes a game of chess, and it is relatively easy to tell if something is a rule of chess or not. But linguistic norms are just some among the many norms governing human behavior, and it is hard to specify which ones they are, if one can't do it by the subject matter of the norms. (I am also inclined to think that the rules of chess might not actually be norms; they are, rather, classificatory rules that specify what counts as a victory, loss, draw or forfeit; the norms governing play are moral.)

Objection 2: Content is not normatively determined.

Response: If that’s right, then my line of argument does fail. But I think a normative picture of content is the right one. In part it’s my Pittsburgh pedigree that makes me want to say that. :-)

Objection 3: Bite the bullet and say that when Alice utters “Not s”, she is in fact asserting (4) and not lying even if C_s obtains. While on this view, technically, lying is never permissible, in practice the view permits the same behaviors as a view on which lying is sometimes permissible.

Response: This just seems implausible. But I wish I had a better response.

Harmony between assertion and mind

Suppose that Gunther thinks that he believes that killing is always wrong, but in fact he believes killing is sometimes permissible. Now, Gunther asserts: “Killing is always wrong.” Is he lying?

On accounts on which to lie is to assert something that one does not believe—or maybe that one disbelieves—to be the case, Gunther has to be lying. But that seems mistaken. Lying is always a form of insincerity. But it seems that a sufficient condition for sincerity in speech is that one be trying one’s best to speak in accord with what one believes. And Gunther could well be doing that.

So maybe lying is asserting contrary to what one thinks one believes? But that seems mistaken. Someone who asserts what she knows is not lying. Suppose Agnieszka knows that caring for her friends is morally important. But her psychiatrist is incompetent and convinces her that she believes that caring for her friends is not morally important. The incompetent psychiatrist’s claims only affects Agnieszka’s second-order beliefs. So, now, Agnieszka asserts: “Caring for my friends is morally important. I wish I could get myself to believe that!” Agnieszka asserts what she knows. Hence, she isn’t lying.

Should we maybe say: To lie is to assert contrary to both what one thinks one believes and what one actually believes? But that seems really gerrymandered. And it also seems that if Agnieszka said: “Caring for my friends is not morally important”, she would be lying.

Maybe what we should do is just say that lying involves a lack of the right kind of harmony between assertion and one’s mind, and leave it as a separate task to figure out what the right kind of harmony should be? (The word “harmony” is one I’m getting from Tollefsen’s book on lying.)

Lying in fiction?

It seems that fiction can't lie because, well, it's fiction. But suppose you are reading a novel, and it says: "A woman wearing a woolen cloak entered the room." A chapter later, you learn there was no woman, but a wizard created an illusion. Weren't you lied to by the author?

In those cases where the narrator is a character, at most the narrator lied. But what if the narration is by an impersonal omniscient narrator? Certainly, at the least there is temporary deceit about the world of the fiction, and the deceit is created within the context of a literary style where the reader expects truth about the world of the fiction.

But lying requires assertion. Could we say that statements of an impersonal omniscient narrator are assertions about the world of the fiction? That would seem to be going too far.

Lying, acting and trust

A spy's message to his handler about troop movements is intercepted. The message is then changed to carry the false information that the infantry will be on the move without artillery support and sent onward. Did those who changed the message lie?

To lie, one must assert. But suppose the handler finds out about the change. Could she correctly say: "The counterintelligence operatives asserted to us that the infantry would be on the move without artillery support?" That just seems wrong. In fact, it seems similar to the oddity of attributing to an actor the speech of a character (though with the important difference that the actor does not typically speak to deceive). The point is easiest to see, perhaps, where there are first person pronouns. If part of the message says: "I will be at the old barn at 9 pm", it is surely false that the counterintelligence staff asserted they will be at the old barn (even though, quite possibly, they will--in order to capture the handler), but it also doesn't seem right to say that the counterintelligence staff asserted that the spy will be there.

The trust account of lying, defended by Jorge Garcia and others, seems to fit well with this judgment. On this account, to lie is to solicit trust while betraying it. But one can only betray a trust in oneself. The counterintelligence operatives, however, did not solicit the handler's trust in themselves: rather, they were relying on the handler's trust in the spy, and that trust the operatives cannot betray.

But there are some difficult edge cases. What if a counterintelligence operative dons a mask that makes him look just like the spy, and speaks falsehoods with a voice imitating the spy? But what if a spy goes to a foreign country with an entirely fictional identity? I am inclined to think that on the trust account the two cases are different. When one imitates the spy, one relies on the faith and credit that the spy has, and one isn't soliciting trust for oneself. When one dresses up as someone who doesn't exist, I think one is trying to gain faith and credit for oneself, and it seems one is lying. But I am not sure where the line is to be drawn.