Everyone Lies: From Post-Truth to Counter-Knowledge
At first glance, truth and lies seem like a stable opposition. However, these concepts are highly dependent on context: a small amount of truth can make a lie more convincing, and some statements may be completely meaningless.
Lying is the concealment, omission, or distortion of information, which can happen either intentionally or unintentionally. It’s important to understand how each participant in communication perceives a lie. You can deceive someone without meaning to: what is a lie from the recipient’s point of view may not be a lie from the source’s perspective, and vice versa. Looking at it broadly, who in the world behaves honestly? Is a rabbit acting honestly when it runs away from a fox on its long legs? Is the fox honest when it sneaks up on the rabbit?
Biology: Deception in Nature
Biology offers many examples of information distortion. One way is through morphological adaptations. For example, if an insect looks like a stick, it’s distorting information for the bird, which won’t notice and eat it. An octopus, when threatened, changes its color and shape to mimic a rock. A predatory turtle lures fish with a tongue appendage that looks like a worm. Animals can also change their typical behavior to mislead rivals or potential prey. Some spiders invade another’s web, pretending to be prey, then attack and eat the deceived host. Male flies distract competitors from their mates by displaying behaviors typical of the opposite sex after mating. Humans and other primates are also capable of tactical deception. Some monkeys, for example, may hide information about a food source from others, even though community members usually alert the group.
When a Statement Is Neither True Nor False, but Meaningless
“This statement is false” is a classic example of the liar paradox. If we assume the statement is false, the person must be lying, but in the end, they’re telling the truth. If we assume it’s true, that also contradicts the statement: the person is telling the truth but admits to lying.
How can we resolve this paradox? One way is to reject the law of bivalence (the law of the excluded middle), which says nothing can both have and not have a property at the same time. Then the original statement can be both true and false, having two truth values. Another option is three-valued logic, where, in addition to “yes” and “no,” there’s “don’t know” or “meaningless.” In this case, we conclude that the statement is neither true nor false, but simply meaningless.
Truth and Lies Depend on Conditions
What is true and what is false? In philosophy, the first question is called a first-order question: it considers a society where everyone accepts the same assumptions and, within those, discusses what is true and what is false. But there are also second-order questions, which deal with areas where people haven’t agreed on such assumptions, and the question is to establish them before discussing truth and lies. Kant called these “transcendental conditions”: he spoke about the possibility of something being true or false.
Post-Truth: When Facts Don’t Matter
The term “post-truth” became Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year in 2016, following a series of political events that defied expert predictions. It describes a situation where objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief. The concept of post-truth brings the idea that our discussions about politics and the world aren’t about truth and lies—they’re about the conditions under which people decide what is true and what is false. The most interesting part is that people recognize this and fight over the conditions that determine truth and falsehood. When U.S. President Donald Trump accuses The New York Times of spreading fake news, and the newspaper accuses the president’s press secretary of lying, the argument isn’t about truth, but about the conditions under which something is decided to be true or false.
Counter-Knowledge: When Truth Supports Lies
Counter-knowledge is misinformation presented as fact, which a critical mass of people has already started to believe. Examples include celebrity gossip, pseudo-historical accounts, and conspiracy theories about major events. Most often, these are claims lacking evidence, or claims whose evidence actually contradicts them. It’s important to understand that not everything in complex events can be explained—some things go unnoticed, some aren’t reported. In some areas, many viewers and listeners aren’t experts, so they’re likely to accept superficial explanations. Many conspiracy theories are built on these gaps.
In such statements, truth often serves as proof of a lie. If you gather a huge number of easily verifiable facts and add a few false ones, you get a convincing speech, news article, or commercial that has nothing to do with reality. For example, you can list several true facts about water: our bodies are more than 60% water; the brain is 75% water; less than 1% of the world’s water is drinkable. Then you add questionable claims: bottling guarantees water quality, leading health experts recommend drinking bottled water and even drink it themselves. Many people will take this argument as a call to action and start buying bottled water for their health.
Lies Depend on Methodology
Distrust of mass survey results has long been a common saying. Everyday intuition suggests: if sociologists, politicians, or officials start assuring you of currency stability, economic growth, or social stability—expect trouble. Any government agency, business, or individual can conduct a survey: it’s easy to create a questionnaire, distribute it, and get some results. By experimenting with wording and the location of spontaneous surveys, you can get any range of opinions—from strong support for the current government to sharp opposition. Citizens’ views are diverse, and it’s impossible to capture the full spectrum through a survey, so attempts to objectively present them are either eccentric or a calculated move to serve someone’s interests.
Sociological surveys often include detailed descriptions of samples: who answered the researcher’s questions. However, the projected sample shows the researcher’s intention, a kind of norm for the survey mechanism, but doesn’t guarantee quality. It’s crucial to know not only who the researcher spoke to and what they answered, but also who refused to answer and why, whether there were attempts to reduce refusals, whether there were deviations from the route, how the researcher addressed respondents, and how this aligns with general survey rules. However, all this increases the time and cost of research, which is not profitable for clients.