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.

A measure of sincerity

On a supervaluationist view of vagueness, a sentence such as “Bob is bald” corresponds to a large number of perfectly precise propositions, and is true (false) if and only if all of these propositions are true (false). This is plausible as far as it goes. But it seems to me to be very natural to add to this a story about degrees of truth. If Bob has one hair, and it’s 1 cm long, then “Bob is bald” is nearly true, even though some precisifications of “Bob is bald” (e.g., that Bob has no hairs at all, or that his total hair length is less than 0.1 cm) are false. Intuitively, the more precisifications are true, the truer the vague statement:

1. The degree of truth of a vague statement is the proportion of precisifications that are true.

But for technical reasons, (1) doesn’t work. First, there are infinitely many precisifications of “Bob is bald”, and most of the time the proportion of precisifications that are true will be ∞/∞. Moreover, not all precisifications are equally good. Let’s suppose we somehow reduce the precisifications to a finite number. Still, let’s ask this question: If Bob is an alligator is Bob bald? This seems vague, even though the precisifications of “Bob is bald” that require Bob to be the sort of thing that has hair seem rather better. But for any precisification that requires Bob to be a hairsute kind of thing, there is one that does not. And so if Bob is an alligator, he is bald according to exactly half of the precisifications, and hence by (1) it would be half-true that he is bald. And that seems too much: if Bob is an alligator, he is closer to being non-bald than bald.

A better approach seems to me to be this. A language assigns to each sentence s a set of precisifications and a measure m_s on this set with total measure 1 (i.e., technically a probability measure, but it does not represent chances or credences). The degree of truth of a sentence, then, is the measure of the subset of precisifications that are actually true.

Suppose now that we add to our story a probability measure P representing credences. Then we can form the interesting quantity E_P(m_s) where E_P is the expected value with respect to P. If s is non-vague, then E_P(m_s) is just our credence for s. Then E_P(m_s) is an interesting kind of “sincerity measure” (though it may not be a measure in the mathematical sense) that combines both how true a statement is and how sure we are of it. When E_P(m_s) is close to 1, then it is likely that s is nearly true, and when it is close to 0, then it is likely that s is nearly false. But when it is close to 1/2, there are lots of possibilities. Perhaps, s is nearly certain to be half-true, or maybe s is either nearly true or nearly false with probabilities close to 1/2, and so on.

This is not unlikely worked out, or refuted, in the literature. But it was fun to think about while procrastinating grading. Now time to grade.

Ineffability

Consider this argument against divine ineffability: Let p be the conjunction of all fundamental truths intrinsically about God (I'm thinking here of something like the Jon Jacobs account of ineffability, but the point should work on other similar accounts). Stipulate that the sentence "It divines" (a feature-placing sentence or zero-place predicate, like in "It rains") expresses p. It divines. It seems I have just said the conjunction of all fundamental truths intrinsically about God. Hence God is not ineffable.

But this argument cannot be sound, since God is in fact ineffable--divine ineffability is, for instance, part of the creed of the Fourth Lateran Council. So what goes wrong with the argument?

First, one might have technical worries about infinite conjunctions or arbitrary linguistic stipulations. I'll put those to one side, though they are worth thinking about.

More deeply, one might worry whether there are any fundamental truths intrinsically about God. Truths are true propositions. Perhaps the fundamental reality of God not only cannot be expressed in language, but cannot even be given propositional form. I am not sure about this, though it is a promising response to the argument. But, plausibly, propositions are divine thoughts. And God surely does express his fundamental reality in his thought (indeed, this is central to Augustine's Trinitarianism).

I want to try out a different response to the argument: question the last step in the argument, the inference "Hence God is not ineffable." This response allows that we can stipulate and assert a sentence that means the conjunction of all fundamental truths intrinsically about God, but denies that this is a problem for ineffability. Ineffability isn't a denial of the possibility of asserting a sentence whose semantic content is such-and-such truths about the divine nature. Rather, it is the denial of the possibility of linguistically communicating these truths. For me to linguistically communicate a truth to you it is required that my sentence give rise to your thinking that truth. But the truth expressed by "It divines" isn't a truth you can think. On this understanding, divine ineffability is an immediate consequence of divine incomprehensibility, and rather than being a doctrine about semantics, it's a doctrine about communication.

If this is right, then stipulation allows the semantics of our language to outrun communication and thought. You can think some deep philosophical truth that I don't know, and I can stipulate that "It xyzzes" means that truth, and I can sincerely assert "It xyzzes." But I don't thereby think that truth. I can, of course, think the second order thought that "It xyzzes" is true, but to do that is not the same as to think that it xyzzes. Similarly, I can think that "It divines" is true, but that's a thought about a piece of stipulated language rather than a thought about God. Indeed, it divines, but I don't understand the sentence "It divines" as I can't grasp the proposition it expresses.

Sometimes people are accused of a certain kind of insincerity like this: "You're just saying the words but don't really understand." This is a different kind of insincerity than when people are lying. A person who is "just saying the words" may believe that the sentence composed of the words is really true, and if so, then she isn't lying. (Corollary: One can say something one doesn't believe and yet not be a liar, as long as one believes that what one is saying is true.) The reason that there may be insincerity in "just saying the words" is that normally one implicates that one believes (and hence has a minimal understanding of) the content of what one says. But that's an implicature that can be canceled to avoid even this kind of insincerity: "I don't exactly know what 'God loves you' means, but I believe that it is true. God loves you." And when people are talking of a topic neither is close to being an expert on, the implicature of understanding one's words may be contextually canceled.

Defending what you don't really believe?

Here's a fascinating study. By changing what was in front of the subjects on the questionnaire they were filling out, the subjects were tricked into believing that they believed the opposite of what they had just affirmed. What is fascinating is that a slight majority not only would read out loud and affirm that opposite (say that something is permissible, which they first said was not), but would go on to defend that in argument.

I wonder what they were asserting when they seemed to affirm the opposite to their initial claim. It's tempting to say that they were simply misspeaking and hence we should not attribute to them the assertion of something that they didn't believe. But then they defended what they literally said, which suggests that this is what they were asserting.

I guess I am inclined to think they weren't asserting contrary to their beliefs, but they were arguing contrary to their beliefs. Maybe this is another way of seeing that arguments come apart from why one believes what one does.

Magda the spy

Magda is a spy. Her handler gives her a spiel consisting of ten statements that she is to make to her enemy contact. Magda has no personal knowledge of whether the statements are true or false, and with a smile asks her handler: "I take it these are mostly false, but there is probably a truth or two tucked in just to mislead them even more?" Her very reliable and honest (she lets Magda do all the lying) handler responds: "Actually, this time it's the other way around. Eight of these statements are true, and two are false."

When Magda tells the spiel to her enemy contact, each of the ten assertions that she makes is an assertion that she thinks is likely, indeed 80% likely, to be true.

Does Magda lie to her enemy contact?

No one of the ten statements on its own seems to be a lie. When I think something is 80% likely to be true and I assert it, I may not be entirely sincere, but surely I am not lying.

Are the ten statements put together, into a spiel, a lie? After all, Magda knows that the conjunction of the ten propositions is false. But a series of statements does not become a lie just because one knows that one of them is false. Just about any non-fiction author of a decent level of humility knows that at least one of the statements in her book is false. So one doesn't utter a lie just because one utters a series of statements at least one of which one knows to be false. For exactly the same reason, the fact that the ten statements make up a single literary unit, a spiel, does not make them a lie, since typical books make a single literary unit and yet are not lies.

At this point, one might react as follows: Who cares whether Magda is lying? Whether she is lying or not, she is clearly dishonest, and her dishonesty is of the same sort as lying.

Here's another case. Magda is one of ten spies, each of whom is given a statement to convey to the enemy. They all know exactly two of the ten statements is false. Is Magda lying? I feel that she's not. She's simply saying something that she thinks is 80% likely to be true, in support of a deceptive plan by her organization.

If Magda isn't lying in the case where the statements are spread out between the spies, I think she isn't lying in the case where she makes all the statements. I do feel that in the case where the statements are spread out, Magda's dishonesty is less. But she is, nonetheless, being dishonest by supporting a deceptive communicative plan.

And maybe that is all we can say about the original case. Magda isn't lying. She is engaging in a dishonest communicative plan that is roughly morally on par with lying. Surely it makes little moral difference that unlike the ordinary liar, Magda doesn't know which of her statements is false. After all, ceteris paribus, there is little moral difference between the person who sets up a trap to kill one particular person and the person who sets up a trap to kill a random person.

But what makes her communicative plan be morally on par with lying? What moral norm applies equally to Magda's activity in the original case and to a variant where she knows which two of the ten statements are false?

I am inclined to think that the basic rough-and-ready moral rule behind the prohibition of lying is something like:

• Strive to assert only truths.

That's very rough. But it marks a difference between Magda and the non-fiction author. Both foresee that they will assert falsehoods. But the non-fiction author is, or so we hope, striving to avoid every instance of this. Not so Magda.

Not every violation of the rule to strive to assert only truths has the same moral weight. Lying is, perhaps, morally graver than BS—speaking with no regard for truth or falsity. And both of them are definitely morally graver than putting some effort into asserting only truths but not enough, say because one isn't being sufficiently careful to follow the evidence.

A lie with no deceit

Let's say you and I believe that there is life outside the solar system. But you're overconfident. So I tell you that there is no life outside the solar system, in order to reduce your confidence. I am not trying to get you to believe that there is no life outside the solar system. I am not even trying to get you to believe that I believe there is no life outside the solar system. I am only trying to reduce the probability you assign to the claim that there is life outside the solar system to a more reasonable level. I am acting epistemically benevolently.

This is still a lie, and so a lie does not require an intention to deceive. A lie can be epistemically benevolent.

And it's still wrong.

Assertion and belief: Another example

Either if N is a supermanifold, then there is a space ΠT*N of the cotangent bundle with reversed parity and it has a natural structure of a P-manifold, or it is not the case that if N is a supermanifold, then there is a space ΠT*N of the cotangent bundle with reversed polarity and it has a natural structure of a P-manifold.[note 1] I just asserted a proposition which I don't believe. Indeed, I don't even grasp this proposition. But, nonetheless, the proposition is surely true, because it is a tautology. (I suppose there is the possibility that the sentence doesn't make sense. There, I take it on Alexandrov's authority[note 2] that it makes sense.) I did not violate any duties of sincerity in asserting the sense.

Hence, sincerity in assertion does not require belief.

If s is the first sentence of this post, I can correctly say: "s but I do not believe that s." And so some Moorean sentences are unproblematic.

Sincerity conditions

The following seem plausible necessary conditions on sincerity:

• Assertion: If I sincerely asserted that p, I intended (at least) that I not be asserting something not true.
• Promise: If I sincerely promised you that p, I intended (at least) that I not be promising something I wouldn't do.
• Command: If I sincerely commanded you that p, I intended (at least) that I not be commanding something you wouldn't do.
• Performative declaration: If I sincerely performatively declared that p, I intended (at least) that I not be performatively declaring something that doesn't come off.

(I intend at least p iff I intend q where q is either p or a strengthening of p. Below I shall for simplicity just talk of "intending p" when I mean "intending at least p".)

These may not be the standard sincerity conditions for these illocutionary acts. More standard conditions would be something like this: if I sincerely commanded you that p, I intended that p or I desired that p, etc. However, these more standard sincerity conditions are incorrect. In earlier posts I've shown this for assertions and promises. The examples adapt to commands, questions and performative declarations. For instance, suppose I send you a command by mail. I may not care at all whether you get the command, but intend that if you get it, you fulfill it (imagine a case of an action which is only an exercise in obedience—it is pointless unless you actually get the command). Interestingly, the sincerity condition for commands rules out some interesting cases. It is, on this view, insincere to command something with the intention that the commandee should fail to fulfill the command and thus earn a punishment. (This rules out certain readings of Scripture, assuming that God is always sincere.) Likewise, if I name a ship "the Queen Mary", I am being insincere if the ship already has been named something else (what if it's already been named "the Queen Mary"?) and I have no authority to change the name. But I need not intend that the ship should have the name "the Queen Mary". I may have reluctantly agreed to try to name it thus, but hope that something will interrupt my naming.

What is striking about the above sincerity conditions is that they all involve truth. Granted, promises are restricted to what I will do and commands to what you will do, but all of these illocutionary acts involve a proposition, and in all of them sincerity requires that I intend not to make the illocutionary act with respect to a false proposition. Curiously, thus, in all these cases, sincerity involves an intention to avoid falsehood. There is thus a deep similarity between asserting, promising, commanding and performatively declaring.

Is this common necessary condition on sincerity also sufficient? No, for if it were, then if p reports a future action of one's own, one could sincerely promise that p under exactly the same conditions under which one could sincerely assert that p. And that isn't so. For instance, I can sincerely promise that I will quit smoking, even though I expect I won't, but I cannot sincerely assert that I will quit smoking when I expect I won't. So the sincerity conditions of some of the above four illocutionary acts must add something to the common condition. I do not know what the appropriate addenda are.

Is what I said above applicable to all illocutionary acts? Well, not directly. Certainly it is not the case that sincerely denying p requires that I intend not to deny something false! However, a surprisingly large number of illocutionary acts can be rephrased so that the above rule should apply. For instance:

• "I deny that p" → "I assert that not p", and this is sincere only if I intend not to be asserting something that isn't true.
• "I congratulate you that p" → "I congratulate you that the good G has befallen you", and this is sincere only if I intend not to be congratulating you on something that isn't true (i.e., in a case where G either isn't good or didn't befall you).
• "I thank you that p" → "I thank you that you provided me with good G", and this is sincere only if I intend not to be thanking you for something that isn't true.
• "I protest that p" → "I protest that you are doing the bad thing B", and this is sincere only if I intend not to be protesting something that isn't true.

In these cases, there is a deep propositional content that differs from the surface propositional content. "I thank you that you gave me a cookie" has a shallow content that you gave me a cookie but for purposes of analysis should be seen as having the deep content that you gave me a cookie which it was good for me to get. (That is why there is a pragmatic contradiction in saying "I thank you that you gave me a cookie that was bad for me to get." And of course "I thank you that 2+2=4" is malformed, unless addressed to Descartes' God.)

If the above moves work, then a large class of illocutionary acts have a common necessary sincerity condition that involves the truth of the proposition forming the deep propositional content of the act. Is this true of all illocutionary acts? I don't know. Is joking or asserting-on-stage an illocutionary act? If so, it would be hard to defend the generality of the claim (though maybe not impossible).

Sincere assertion

This is a point exactly parallel to my last point about promising. It is widely thought that x can only sincerely say that p if x believes that p. That claim is subject to a simple counterexample. An expert entomologist, German speaker and friend of mine gives me a sentence s of German, and he assures me that the proposition p that s expresses (a) is about insects, (b) is true, and (c) is not believed by me. I know no German. I then utter s to some German speakers. In so doing, it seems, I say that p, though I do not believe p. But I am sincere—at least, I violate no requirements of integrity in speech, of which sincerity is one.

Maybe this example does not impress. Perhaps you're worried that by uttering s I do not manage to say that p, because speaker meaning is essential for truthtelling. Or perhaps you modify the sincerity condition to say that one only sincerely utters s if one either believes the proposition expressed by s or believes that s is true. So let's move on to a second counterexample.

The following is sufficient for sincerely saying that p: one knows that were one to say that p, then p would be true. Antecedent belief that p is not required for sincerely saying that p. And consequent belief that p is not required, either, because sincerity in speech is not affected by what happens after one has spoken—and we can imagine that one is killed right after saying p. Here is a fun case. George, whom I trust, has promised me that he'll dance a jig whenever I tell anybody in his presence that he'll dance a jig. So I say to you: "George will dance a jig." I need not have any antecedent belief that George will dance a jig, because unless I succeed in saying the sentence, he probably won't dance it, and I am not sure I'll manage to say the sentence, because I have lately had trouble enunciating the word "jig". Nonetheless, I do not offend against the aspect of the virtue of integrity that has to do with sincerity.

It likewise follows that sincere assertion of p need not be the expression of a belief that p. One might think that perhaps it is the expression of a conditional belief: if I were to make this assertion, then p would hold. But it is very implausible to suppose that our assertions express this belief. Surely when I say that 2+2=4, I am not speaking about speakings.

So, it does not appear that sincere assertion need be the expression of any belief at all. However, a sincere assertion presupposes a belief, though not necessarily a belief that is expressed in the assertion.

The above leaves open the question whether believing that p, while not necessary for sincerely saying that p, might not be sufficient. Here, I do not know. The following case is one to think about. I falsely believe that I cannot utter the word "frog" due to a deep trauma. Let s be the sentence "I cannot utter the word 'frog'" (I count uttering "'frog'" as an uttering of "frog"—make this stipulative). I consider uttering s. I believe I can't succeed. But I can still try. And so I try, and succeed. Was I sincere? I am not sure. I knew that I was trying to say something which, if I succeeded, would be false. However, it is also not obvious to me that I am insincere. It's a tough question.

Arguments and sincerity

When we write down a complex logical argument, it seems there is a pretty good chance that while writing down the proof, we will write down sentences that express propositions which we do not believe. Some of these sentences will be as part of a conditional proof, and those are not puzzling. But some of the sentences that express propositions which it seems we do not believe will be simply asserted. For instance, in the middle of our argument, we might make a claim that involves some complex logical or mathematical formula, which we then expand out using appropriate manipulation rules. But the expanded out claim may well exceed our mental capacities: we can handle it on paper, but it is just too complex for us to believe, it seems.

If this is right, then sincerity does not require that I believe what I say. (I assume the rules for sincerity do not depend on whether I am writing or speaking.) All that is required is that I believe that what I am saying is true. (What should I say about the speaker meaning in such a case?)

Or so it seems. But here is a curious test case. Politician reads a speech that her speechwriter wrote. She trusts her speechwriter to write only truths. The politician did not read over the speech ahead of time. She enunciates the sentences carefully, but she is distracted and pays no attention to what the text says. I think we would say that she is not being fully sincere. Maybe, though, our standards for sincerity are unfairly high in the case of politicians. Or maybe there are different kinds of sincerity—there is the bare sincerity which is one's duty in speech, and there is something that one might call "real sincerity" which entails conviction (where conviction is belief and more).

On the other hand, there is a different way of looking at the case of the complex sentence in an argument (this is inspired by some things that David Manley said based on his book with John Hawthorne). Maybe we can simply gain access to the proposition by means of the sentence, without having ourselves to understand or even parse the sentence.

Or maybe the things in the middle of proofs should not count as assertions. Perhaps making steps in proof is a mechanical procedure, akin to punching buttons on a calculator and likewise intrinsically devoid of propositional content, aimed at producing empirical evidence of the truth of some entailment. (That the evidence produced by a complex proof is empirical in nature is clear to me, weird as it may sound. One reason is that memory is intricately involved.)