What It Means to Be Truthfully Misleading

Although there are some who might feel no compunction about lying, most of us follow unspoken but widely understood rules of conversation that lead us to expect that people in general tell us the truth. But it turns out that these rules leave a bit of a gray area between the words we actually say and how they can be interpreted, giving us a lot of wiggle room between telling the complete truth and lying.

How can we be truthful but misleading?

From the standpoint of semantics, or the linguistic study of meaning, one can mislead without actually lying. How might this be?

Well, lying involves making a statement that you know to be false. For instance, imagine a situation where a woman named Taylor made a cherry pie. Taylor, being the generous sort, tells her housemates to feel free to share the pie. After dinner, Taylor goes to get the pie out of the fridge, anticipating enjoying a post-dinner slice, only to find that there is no pie left. Not surprisingly, she suspects her housemates of pie gluttony.

One housemate, John, claims to not have eaten any pie, asserting, “I have not even tasted a morsel of the pie.” This constitutes a false statement as John had a couple forkfuls of pie at the same time that another housemate, Susan, was digging in. John, in other words, was lying as he intentionally stated something he knew to be false.

Savvy Susan, on the other hand, tells Taylor, “Well, I had a piece of pie earlier.” What she failed to mention was that, other than the two forkfuls she saw John eat, she finished off the entire pie. In short, she was really the pie thief, but, unlike John, she was trying to get away with deceptive behavior without actually lying. She accomplished this by telling the truth but in a way that linguists refer to as being truthfully misleading.

Not quite the whole truth

The way that Susan misled Taylor in the above example is by using what linguists call a scalar implicature. A scalar implicature is when you use a smaller term (here, saying "a piece") instead of a larger term (like "all") to imply that the smaller term is the most relevant one to the context without explicitly stating it. In other words, by saying she had "a piece" of the pie, Susan led Taylor to think that she only had one piece of the pie, when in fact she pretty much ate the whole thing—the linguistic trick being that she never said anything about what she did with the rest of the pie.

Leaning on scalar implicatures like "some" or "a piece" allows deceptive speakers to say something that is literally true, as they simply omit mention of the rest of the entity or object being discussed. For example, Susan said she ate a piece of the pie, which was true, but she also ate all other pieces of the pie, too, including the piece she admitted to eating. Thus, she did not lie. Had she said, “I ate a piece of the pie; in fact, all of it!” we would not feel like the "a piece" and "all" were contradictory, which tells us that "a piece" is subsumed in the semantics of "all."

Conversational implicatures

In being misled, Taylor relied on the fact that, when we enter in conversations, we assume speakers are as informative as possible when we are talking with them. This is sometimes referred to as the "maxim of quantity." This maxim states that, when talking to each other, we should be as informative as is required—no more or no less. But because this is merely an implicit understanding, when someone violates this rule, they have plausible deniability: They can deny they lied, as they were instead simply under-informative in terms of what we expect in that circumstance.

Of course, in the fictional example above, all that was at stake was a cherry pie and good will among housemates. In the real word, the stakes can be much higher. For instance, in courtroom testimony, a witness might use the tack of being misleadingly truthful to throw off suspicion without being subject to perjury.

In fact, in a well-known legal case, Bronston v. United States, Mr. Bronston answered a question about whether he had ever had a Swiss bank account by saying. “My company had an account there for about six months.” It turns out that Mr. Bronston had also previously had a personal account, but by mentioning only his company’s account, he led to the implicature that he himself did not ever have one. Later accused of perjury for this statement, the Supreme Court ruled that it could not be considered deceptive as its ruling was based on the literal truth, not on what might be inferred.

Deception Essential Reads

A Lie Is a Lie Is a Lie

Two Cues That Will Give a Liar Away

A thin line between the truth and the not so truthful

So, if the Supreme Court can’t call it lying, it sure makes it tough on the rest of us to call people out on the way they might manipulate the truth to throw off suspicion. The advantage of truthful deception may be that a strict semantic interpretation gets you off the hook when you chow down on your roommate’s baked goods, but it certainly doesn’t free you of the guilt of eating someone else’s pie.