In 1692 a group of female children claimed to have been ... molested ... if you will ...

[Igel]

66. Ah. Perhaps I've spotted the problem.

You think that to say something untrue means "to lie." Lying is generally considered a morale failing, esp. if in self-interest or vindictiveness. (I can imagine situations in which lying would be a morale virtue, but they're fairly limited in scope and duration.) DU is a highly moralistic place.

So if I say somebody may be making an accusation based upon a false memory the assumption is that I'm saying they may be lying. If I point out how some accusers rely on false memories I'm saying that those accusers are lying. Nothing could be farther from the truth.


There are numerous instances in which people say false things but aren't lying because they believe what they're saying. Recently I was told to look for somebody in the school library. The person wasn't there. The person had gone to the library then remembered she'd forgotten something in her room. The person who told me wasn't lying. The person was simply in error.

President Obama recently said that upward mobility had flatlined in the last decade. But days before a report came out saying it hadn't changed in the last 50 years. Was the President lying? No. The speech was probably prepared before the latest research was published, and nobody thought to update the speech--which would have weakened the point being made (so perhaps a bit of confirmation bias is at play--but that's also not lying).

In both cases the person involved believe s/he was telling the truth. That is the difference between lying and being wrong. At DU often we love assuming people have morale failings rather than insufficient or inaccurate knowledge. Morale failings go to character and provide the basis for judgment; insufficient or inaccurate knowledge is often a trivial failing that can be easily fixed.


Finally, I told my kid recently he had a Dr. Pepper in the fridge. I didn't know his mother had drunk it a few hours before. If he had been 4, he'd have accused me of lying. He's 10. He knew the difference, and instead of saying, "Daddy, you lied!" concluded, "Daddy, somebody must have drunk it!"