How could YOU plan to have ME ask YOU a question? How could YOU plan to have ME ask YOU a PARTICULAR question? How did you arrange that, what specifically did you do that made me ask you a specific question? Did you also control particular place and time? How? How do you control the minds of other people so that they ask you questions? How do you control their minds so that they ask you just the question you want them to, so that you can truthfully answer it and deceive them as per your “plan”? What if they’d asked you a different question? How would you have compelled them to ask the question you wanted so that you could execute your plan? Did your plan involve a lot of mind control and a lot of questions, where they kept asking you the wrong one before they got it right or did your mind control powers work first time.
How did you control the THOUGHTS of another person? Your plan depends on that other person not believing you. How did you make that other person not believe you? How was their thought process and what they did and didn’t believe controlled by you? How do you see into other people’s thoughts to KNOW what they will or will not believe? When did you penetrate the mind of the person you manipulated into asking you the question so that you knew what question you should be asked so that you could deceive by the truth? Did the mind penetration to KNOW what they would or would not believe happen some time before you controlled their mind to ask you the right question for the answer you planned to deceive with?
Why did you want to control the thoughts of the other person, to get them to ask you the question so that you could answer it truthfully and thereby deceive them? What was your motivation? Doesn’t your ‘plan’ seem a bit haphazard? What would you have done if (like a normal, rational, person) they’d just believed your answer and your plan to deceive was thwarted by rational behaviour? Weren’t you concerned that they’d ask you clarifying questions? How did you KNOW that they wouldn’t? When did that bit of mind penetration happen?
How did you develop these superpowers that most people don’t have? The ones where you can read minds and compel others to direct specific questions at you?
Nothing about that ‘scenario’ is plausible. 2. What’s wrong with your original scenario that you’ve switched to this “fictional general” Do you accept that it is ridiculous?
You still need to explain how mind-reading is possible. Your “plausible” general story also relies on mind-reading. THE FICTIONAL GENERAL HAS NO BASIS WHATSOEVER TO IMAGINE WHAT THIS FICTIONAL ENEMY MIGHT DO. He had no way of knowing that he was dealing with the brain-dead.
Your insistence that people can plan to deceive others because they can read minds and know what others will do is nonsense. You can continue to insist, you can continue to invent “scenarios” but it will always be nonsense.
If you give someone information expecting them to believe something untrue, even if it’s the literal truth, then you’ve lied to them.
If you expect that the statement can’t be correctly understood without some qualifier, and you deliberately withhold that qualifier with intent to deceive, what you’ve done is a lie of omission.
Thanks, and this is pretty obvious to me as well. I appear to be getting challenged that such a scenario could ever occur… which actually wasn’t even my original question…
There was no statement. The person answered a question. The person answered it truthfully and completely.
There was, on the OP’s question, no lie of omission, nothing untrue, no left out qualifier, no deceit. The OP elected to ignore the information she was given and just wants to feel aggrieved without any rational basis. You can’t just impute dishonesty in somebody else because of your own decision to disregard what you were told.
The OP was told the complete truth. To imagine “deceit” is irrational.
Since we’re 3rd parties not privy to the specifics of the OP’s situation, we can only treat it as hypothetical here. I am just trying to describe how we’d characterize it if the OP’s situation were real - that is, if the person intended to deceive, and successfully did so, by telling a highly unexpected truth without a qualifier to manage the expectation. So we’re in a hypothetical here.
Intent matters. If a statement or utterance (whatever term satisfies your semantic quibble on that point) would reasonably be seen as unbelievably absurd or incredible, and you omit a qualifier indicating that it’s not a joke, then you’ve made an omission that leads someone to false belief. If the misleading was intentional, then it’s a lie of omission.
Communication is a two-party effort, the speaker has 100% as much responsibility as the listener in getting the message across, and part of this is a responsibility to anticipate the “filters” that your audience may have.
Again, you’re free to debate whether this actually happened in the OP, but that’s not interesting to me since we only have enough information to treat it as hypothetical. Hypothetically, if it did happen like that, it’s a lie of omission.
“Yeah, a pretty convincing costume, huh? Watch this. I’m Jeff Montgomery and I’m required by law to inform you that I’m a repeat sex offender and I’ll be living in your neighborhood! It’s a great costume, right? Happy Halloween!”
Was Jeff lying, or something else? That’s the basic scenario in the OP, though they take it to much more absurd levels than the above.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, we will prove to you beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant committed perjury when he testified truthfully on the stand. You must find him guilty because the jury in that case disregarded his truthful and honest testimony and believed he was lying. You must find him guilty because we cannot allow witnesses to testify truthfully on the stand if a jury will not believe them. I urge you to find this honest man guilty of perjury for his failure to lie under oath.
We only know this because of the comedic exaggeration, though. He truthfully stated that his costume is “sex offender” (though he really is a sex offender, who’s to say that he also isn’t costumed as a sex offender? That molester mustache, those eyeglasses, those clothes).
We know he’s lying only because we know his intent, and the only evidence of his intent is the obviously exaggerated comedic irony and the media context (We already know we’re watching SNL, and obviously the ruse wouldn’t hold up to the point of having people sign acknowledgment forms… or would it?)
But in the final analysis, he told 2 literal truths (this is a sex offender costume, I am a sex offender) to give the opposite impression (that he isn’t really a sex offender).
In the film For a Few Dollars More, Clint Eastwood’s character attempts to infiltrate a gang of bank robbers for the secret purpose of turning them in to the law. To win them over, he helps bust one of the gang members out of jail. When the gang asks him why he wants to join, he tells them the God’s honest truth, clearly intending to deceive them. It works, and the gang let him in.
(You can watch the scene here, scroll to 1:06:20).
As Steve MB pointed out upthread, TVTropes calls this a ‘Sarcastic Confession’, of which there is a ‘Straight’ variety. I am satisfied this is the answer to my question. Thank you Steve MB.
Kids are prepping for trying to summon a creature from the upside-down. They buy a bunch of stuff from the local hardware store: ropes, duct tape, large knives, bungie ties, etc. Clerk says “What are you kids doing with all this stuff?”
