Perjury, puffery, and the presidency: Two ways to not (quite) lie
Laurence Horn
Yale University, USA
Abstract
Over the last year, a vigorous debate has arisen on whether and how journalists are to distinguish lies from other false statements in a “post-truth” era. Philosophers, theologians, linguists, and jurists have long debated the status of lies and, in particular, of those lies that rise to the level of perjury. The framing and enforcement of perjury statues requires a regimentation of the intuitive notion of lying, invoking the key roles played by utterance context and interlocutors’ goals in distinguishing speakers who lie from those who (merely) intentionally mislead, a distinction that in turn maps onto the corresponding dichotomy in neo-Gricean pragmatic theory between what is said and what is implicated (Adler 1997, Horn 2009, Saul 2012). Ever since Augustine and Aquinas, the characterization of lying has focused not (just) on objective falsity but on the roles of speakers’ intentions, as well as on the difference between assertion and (mere) implication. The classic definition posits four components of a lie: a speaker S lies in uttering p if and only if (i) S says/asserts that p, (ii) S believes that p is false, (iii) p is in fact false, and (iv) S intends to deceive H into believing that p is true. To assert something one correctly believes to be false with the intent to deceive H is surely to lie. But must all four criteria be satisfied? Several recent theoretical and experimental studies by philosophers and linguists have explored this question (with varied results), largely concentrating on the conceptual and empirical status of criteria (iii) and (iv). But for pragmatics, and for the framers of perjury statutes, it is the resolution of (i) that is of particular interest, along with the difficulty of ascertaining the practical satisfaction of (ii) given the impossibility of reading minds. Over several centuries, the practice of “hiding the truth”—a key subspecies of misleading or attempted deception in which falsity is implicated rather than directly asserted—has historically been regarded both within and outside the courtroom as a lesser offense than outright lying.
More recently, the linguistic practices of two very different American presidents, Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, and our reactions to those practices shed useful light on the fundamental issues involved. Both Clinton and Trump have devised methods to mislead without lying by exploiting different criteria in the classic definition. Two decades ago, Clinton, following in the radical intentionalist footsteps of the 17th century Jesuits (Pascal 1656), deployed equivocation, quantity implicature, and other devices for “hiding the truth”, getting his listeners to deceive themselves about what is said without technically lying himself. Given the judicially sanctioned literal truth defense (Tiersma 1990), Clinton practiced sophistry but not perjury. More recently, President Trump—while freely dispensing provably false statements—is also arguably not lying, given that he either (i) sincerely believes his claims to be true, (ii) neither believes nor disbelieves them (see Frankfurt 2005), (iii) explains them as sarcastically intended, or (iv) excuses them as instances of “innocent hyperbole” (Trump 1987), akin to what marketers call “puffery”. I will discuss both Clinton’s and Trump’s ways of not quite lying and the implications of their practices for forensic science, journalism, pragmatic theory, and civil society.