In TOK today, Mr. Perkins asked the question "what ways of knowing are used when lying?" and before I forgot how to communicate, this was my answer: ultimately, the same ways of knowing that are applied to a truth or even a belief are used for a lie. So, all ways of knowing are applied.
However, lying seems to involve both intuition and reasoning more so than determining the truth. Telling a lie entails understanding all perspectives of an argument so that the lie can be effective. Intuition determines how to phrase the lie while reasoning determines the extent of the lie.
Truth, on the other hand, can be "absolute," such that mere acknowledgment of the truth (just realizing that the truth exists) is enough and understanding the entire meaning is not necessary. The truth, then, uses all ways of knowing equally.
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3 comments:
Sriya, you mentioned in class today that a belief falls somewhere between absolute truth and a lie. However, I would like to argue that there is nothing actually between truth and untruth- something is either true or it is not. No half-truths, no partial truths. A belief may have some elements of truth in it, but as in mathematical proofs, if one part of a statement is false, the entire statement is rendered untrue. A belief falls into its own category aside from truth and lies as it is not yet known or judged to be absolutely true or false.
The application of math to the concept of truth can lead to some slightly misleading conclusions. The logic that if one part of a statement is false the entire statement is false is not accurate in all cases. If one facet of an argument is false, it does not necessarily make the argument itself false, it is just fallacious reasoning. For example: The Americans won the Revolutionary War. I know this because we speak a different language than the British. While we DON'T speak a different language than the British, we DID win the Revolution.
Additionally, your argument has assumed that there is an absolute truth. While such a thing may exist, in my opinion, truth is based on what the majority believe. For example, for centuries it was a fact that the world was flat, and that earthworms spawned from rain due to spontaneous generation. While we know these ideas to be false, who's to say that some of the information we hold true won't be disproven at some point in the future? I don't think we can ever really know what truth is absolute.
Also, I think a distinction must be made between what is a lie and what is not true. A lie is told to decieve, wheras someone may share information that is not true without intending to decieve. The scientists who studied the galaxy as geocentric legitimately believed that all heavenly bodies revolved around the Earth. Their subsequent publications weren't lies, they were just not true.
Well! I want to mention one more way of knowing when a person is lying, cause the "lying" part really caught my eye. I think common sense is a really big part of lying. In order to have a successful lie you have say something that makes sense as well as something that could actually be true. For example if a child brings home a random dog and the child says it was a gift from a friend, clearly the child didn't really use his or her common sense cause the parents could just check with the parents of the friend. like really? in order for your lie to be affective you have to make your lie believable.
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