This is part 4 of the Linguistics series "Misunderstandings". You can read parts 1, 2 and 3 by clicking on the corresponding link. This latest entry is to nip the accusation that I might be unfairly hiding my opinions or fence sitting in the bud, while further solidifying my conclusion. First, the text that I wrote in part 3 which might be accused as fence sitting:

Are you assuming that my "preferred" definition of "lying" is "stating a falsehood, independent of whether it was intentional or not"? You shouldn't be making that assumption. As far as I can recall, I have not stated what my definition of the term "lie" is anywhere on my blog. What I have stated is that there exists people who use that definition. In particular, I did not state that I was one of those people.

An adversary may consider this to be an dishonorable fence-sitting tactic: By avoiding to state my opinion, it's impossible for anyone to argue that my opinion is wrong. Pretty sneaky, huh? Except I am not fence-sitting at all. To accuse me of fence-sitting once again makes the fallacious assumption that there should only be one specific definition for a given term, and that if anyone doesn't choose one specific definition, then they are cowardly. Recall that the central thesis of this series of post is that there isn't one specific definition for words, and that each ideolect has its own definition. As a person who realizes and agrees with this theory, I will adapt the definition of lie depending on who I am speaking to. This is probably a bit confusing, so I will explain using a simpler example.

Consider the 4 character sequence 'c', 'h', 'a', 't'. Taken together, this produces the character stream "chat". What does this character stream mean? Well, its meaning depends entirely on the language being spoken. If we are dealing with English, the character stream is probably a textual representation of the word referring to a small, usually intimate discussion. If instead, we are dealing with French, the character stream is instead a textual representation of the word referring to a feline mammal, otherwise known as a cat. I'm going to avoid getting into the definition of the term "word", as it's unnecessary for my point, and will only distract from it. In particular, I will not get into whether the "chat", meaning a short discussion, and "chat" meaning a cat, are the "same" words. Instead, I will assume that no one will argue that it is the same character-stream, and its semantic meaning depends on the language being spoken.

Now recall that I believe every individual speaks a different language (and linguists have an official name for this, "ideolect"). Given that the same character-stream can mean different things depending on the language being spoken, it should come to no surprise then that the term "lie" means different things to different people (since each of these people are speaking their own language, or ideolect). Fine, I'm just repeating what I wrote in the first 3 parts (for the benefits of the readers who are too lazy to read them). But what about my rebuttal to the accusation that I'm fence sitting? Here it is:

No reasonable person would accuse me of "fence-sitting" merely because I refuse to choose between whether the character-stream "chat" refers to the feline mammal or a short discussion. When I communicate with someone, I take into account the language that that person is familiar with. If I am speaking to a francophone, I will use the term "chat" to refer to the mammal. When I am communicating to an anglophone, I will use the term "chat" to refer to the short discussion. Similarly, is a francophone is speaking to me, and uses the term "chat", I will assume they are referring to the feline mammal, and if an anglophone is speaking to me, and uses the term "chat", I will assume they are referring to a short discussion. There's no fence-sitting going on here. I am making an effort to produce signals which I expect the recipient will understand. If I have to use a different set of signals because each recipient speaks a different language, well, that's just the way life is, and I will have to learn to deal with it. Stomping my foot on the ground, proclaiming all Frenchies are stupid-heads because clearly the term "chat" must refer to a small discussion, and the idea that it may refer to a mammal is dumb, won't solve any problems. It's just being childish.

Similarly, when I am speaking to someone, and I know that they think that "lie" means a certain thing, then I will only use the term "lie" with them when I mean that same thing. And when that someone uses the term "lie" when speaking to me, I will assume they are using their definition of "lie", unless we had, earlier in the conversation, agreed on some other definition of "lie" temporarily for the duration of that particular conversation. In other words, "my" definition of "lie" changes, depending on who I speak to.

As an aside, I alluded to this concept of "speaking a different language, depending on who you are speaking to" in part 2, subtly hinting at msanford (or any other linguist) to tell me if this concept has been studied in linguistics, and if it had a name. I guess msanford didn't pick up on the hint, so I'm repeating the question more explicitly here.

To wrap this all back to the original argument I had with my anonymous opponent in part 2, what I am getting at is that someone, somewhere on the internet had used the term "lying" in some text that they wrote. Since I have never met the author of that text, I didn't know which of the two popular definitions of "lying" said author was using (or perhaps he was using some 3rd, unpopular, definition, but I had temporarily discarded that possibility as too-low-probability until further notice), and I interpreted the rest of his text as such. The author had written that certain people told lies, and I kept in my mind that the author may or may not be accusing said people of intentionally stating falsehoods. In other words, I felt the text was ambiguous. My anonymous opponent, on the other hand, felt there was only one "correct" definition for lying, and since there is only one correct definition, this author must be using that "correct" definition, and thus was falsely accusing people of intentionally lying.

Actually, the fact that the author could not possibly guess at what the intent of the people whom he was accusing was, this led me to strongly favor the definition of lying which is "stating a falsehood (perhaps unintentionally)". Based on his text, the author otherwise seemed like a reasonable person, so I had no reason to think that he would be make this uncharacteristically unsupportable assertion, so it seemed to me, that it is more reasonable to assume that he meant the lies may be unintentional. So if I were forced (e.g. at gunpoint) to make a guess about what the author intended, I'd guess it was the "unintentional falsehood" definition, but I am open to the possibility that the author may have intended other definitions.

What was frustrating for me was that my opponent stubbornly believed, much like Leafy Person is doing now, that I was arguing "My definition is right, and your definition is wrong." That's not it. I'm saying there is no right or wrong definition. There are many different definitions, and they can't be classified as "right" or "wrong". They simply are, and when communicating with people, you need to realize that different people have different definitions in order to avoid misunderstandings. Into other words, this is a plea towards open-mindedness in the definition of words, rather than an advocacy towards any one particular definition for words.