Brynjulf Tellefsen wrote:

> Richard, can you think of any instance where what the knower says is not
> considered by the knower to be the truth? Otherwise the knower would be
> knowingly lying to him/herself, or others. But the world it filled with
> liars, at least so do those who disagree proclaim the truth to be.....
>
Consider these ideas:

>[S]emiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be
used in order to lie. (Eco 1976b, p. 7)

> Long term deceit requires the invention of an analog self that can 'do' or 'be
something quite different from what a person actually does or is, as seen by
his associates. It is an easy matter to imagine how important for survival
during the centuries such an ability would be. Overrun by invaders . . . if
a man could be one thing on the inside and another thing on the outside,
could harbour his hatred and revenge behind a mask of acceptance of the
inevitable, such a man would survive. Or . . . being commanded by invading
strangers, perhaps in a strange language, the person who could obey
superficially and have 'within him' another self with 'thoughts' contrary to
his disloyal actions, who could loathe the man he smiled at, would be much
more successful in perpetuating himself and his family in the new
millennium. (Jaynes 1982, pp. 219-20)

> One very simple consequence of a lie is that it involves not sharing one's
thoughts with someone else. The central point to understand about semiotic
phenomena is that they involve the *stand-for* relation which operates quite
differently from other kinds of relations. For example if we talk about
causal relations we think of one event always preceding another: ice melts
because of a rise in temperature, so that when we see the ice melt we take
that to be a reliable indication that it is getting warmer. In other words
we do not expect the melting of ice to tell us a lie about the temperature.
Indeed so sure are we of some kinds of relations, which we call causal, that
it seems preposterous to even think about the possibility of lies in this
area. But if someone came in out of the cold and said 'it is getting warmer'
or 'the ice is melting' we might believe them but we could never rule out
the possibility that they were Lying; and it is that possibility which
points to one of the distinctive characteristics of the *stand-for*
relation. As many people discover from bitter experience, our conversations,
which can seem the greatest source of intimacy and understanding, can on
occasions be the source of deception and failure to comprehend. Any adequate
theory of communication must deal with lies as well as truth. It is a
curious fact of Western scholarship that there are endless treatises on the
subject of truth but few on Lying (see Bok (1978) and Goffman (1974) for
important exceptions). It is as if the weight of the former were intended to
crush the other out of existence. Yet our private and public lives are
filled with both. Lying is the repressed taboo of our intellectual life,
just as sex is sometimes the repressed taboo of social life. The liar
paradox of traditional philosophy would have been far more intriguing and
would have led to many more interesting insights if instead of the form it
normally takes, 'All Cretans are liars', it had taken the form All Cretans
*can* lie'. (In search of Semiotics, Sless D 1986)



David

--
Professor David Sless
Director
Communication Research Institute of Australia
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