The Invention of Lying seems to fall victim to the same logical fallacy as Liar, Liar

Namely, that “not lying” means “always tells the truth.”

(I should point out all my information comes only from the trailers, so maybe the movie as a whole isn’t as it appears.)

In one seen, Tina Fey, as Ricky’s assistant, says something to the effect of “you don’t have any messages because I told everyone you were getting fired in a week.”…was there a reason she had to add the “getting fired in a week” part? She still would not have been lying is she just said “no, no messages.” Simply not being capable of lying doesn’t mean you therefore have to say EVERYTHING.

There is also part when Jennifer Garner is on her phone while on her date with Ricky, and says “no, I won’t be sleeping with him tonight.” She couldn’t have just said no? I mean…if someone asks me a question on the phone, rarely do I then repeat the question back in my answer. But then, this is less of an issue of “not lying” and more of a general “thing” that’s done in movies.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure it’s still a funny movie, but it still grates on me that to a lot of writers, “not lying” is synonymous with “I always tell everyone everything I think about everything.” Does it bother anyone else, or is it just me?

Well, unlike in Liar Liar, it seems like in this universe, that’s just what people do. Now, I’ve also only got info from the trailers, but it seems like the idea of even just telling half-truths doesn’t exist.

Just you.

And, yes, everyone lies to spare other people’s feelings. If you are committed to telling the absolute truth, then you should be telling the truth all the time. Withholding information is a form of lying (though one essential for interpersonal relationships).

And, of course, it’s funnier to play it that way. The movie is a comedy, you see.

For a really nice take on the matter, read James Morrow’s City of Truth.

I’d bet dollars to doughnuts that at the end of this story, the characters come around to realizing that the best policy is not fabrication and falsehood, but to try to be as honest as possible while taking into account whether you’ll hurt the other person’s feelings, whether they really need to know a particular piece of information, and what’s the right time and place to bring things up. There, I just saved $8.

Right, this annoyed me also. Being honest does not mean being a blabbermouth. :mad:

Must disagree. Telling the WHOLE truth would take you all your life and you’d end unfinished: the limitations of language and time force you to chose what part of all the information at your disposal is relevant to communicate every single time you speak or write. No “lying” there, you just CAN’T provide all the information.

IMO the point of a lot of these parables about honesty is that one can actually be honest without being callous and sensitive without having to pander – that honest-but-sensitive is better than either brutally blunt or smarmy BS artist.

I’m not a movie watcher, so I see this come up in fantasies where the victim is under a truth spell or some such. I thought I was the only one bothered by this. There is a difference between honesty and truth, mmkay? If someone intends to deceive you by mentioning a fact out of context, that is dishonest but still technically truthful. For that matter, if you say something which you mistakenly think is true, one could argue you’re being honest if not truthful.

From what I’ve read, the premise is that the film takes place in a universe where lying doesn’t exist until Ricky Gervais comes up with the first lie- God.

Viewing a Comedy, Lesson One: Play along with the premise or you are doomed to start threads declaiming the logical fallacies in it, as it will annoy your date. This is especially true of Romantic Comedies.

Yep, logical fallacy solved:

In this world, not lying means also minimal lies by omission whereinsofar as it results in funny.
Which all movie logical holes were to easy to resolve.

How is Jim Carrey’s condition in Liar, Liar a logical fallacy? It’s a magical curse, free to interpret and define “lies” and “truth” as it sees fit. His character still manages a few lies of omission.

I was just going to say what gary did. Liar, Liar is about a magic spell, not a computer program. It doesn’t have to behave logically.

Whatever else it is, it’s not a logical fallacy. You may take the view that this (‘we don’t lie’ = ‘we tell all the truth about everything’) is a mistake, a discrepancy, an annoyingly lazy aspect of the script, a flaw, a trite plot device or many other things, but it isn’t a logical fallacy.

I suspect that the OP used the term ‘logical fallacy’ to try and sound intellectually impressive. This is at least as annoying as comedy writers having characters behave in a way that the premise does not require them to behave.

Good point.

Has anyone done a TVTropes article on this script trick yet, or seen it included in an existing one?

Read the following very slowly:

The movie is a comedy

It is funnier that way. No one is going to go to a dull and unfunny movie because it is more accurate.

In addition, by having people tell the whole truth all the time, it makes the movie’s point. If the movie was intended to be serious (though I doubt you can make the point without some comic effect), the idea is to make the point clear and obvious, to focus on the disadvantages.

That is the nature of fiction. It is not required to be accurate (and in this case, it is certainly not required to be accurate to your own idiosyncratic interpretation of how things should be).

Curiously, there doesn’t seem to be a page devoted to “cannot lie” = “tell the entire truth,” which would seem to be right up TVTropes’ alley. There is Can Not Tell A Lie which includes that as a potential variant, but doesn’t pay it any particular attention.

I Know THAT. I was not disagreeing with the movie, I was disagreeing with YOU.

Specifically with the statement “…everyone lies to spare other people’s feelings. If you are committed to telling the absolute truth, then you should be telling the truth all the time. Withholding information is a form of lying” and that it somehow represents the mentioned comedic trope.

Dang, had to get the phone, missed the edit window…

To elaborate: IMO there are different witholdings – mere witholding of information because it’s not immediately relevant to the conversation at hand is not “lying”. Witholding of information that is relevant and would be necessary or beneficial is what’s dishonest.

The joke in these scenarios is really more of a “you can’t handle the truth”. The writer safely assumes the audience would reflexively claim to support the idea that you want the people you interact with to ALWAYS be “honest”. So you set up a plot device by which “honesty” is so absolute and all-encompassing that (this definition of) honesty becomes the WORST policy, and the audience has to awkwardly self-examine what DID they mean by wanting honesty. Many embarassment-based laughs and hijinks ensue, until people come around to decide that yeah, malicious lying is bad, but truthfulness must be tempered with sensitivity.

… and yet another example of a person thinking too small.

If I were the only person capable of lying in the world, and no one else could even conceive of the concept of telling an untruth, I would aim higher than just getting Jennifer Garner into bed.

Although that *would *be a minor side effort…

Yeah, that’s my impression from the trailers as well. It’s not that these people value honesty, it’s that they don’t even understand the idea of deception. They don’t know it’s possible. Such people wouldn’t be capable of deliberately misleading others through omission of information. It wouldn’t even occur to them.

From the OP:

Telling him why he didn’t get any messages isn’t telling him EVERYTHING. She didn’t start babbling about what she had for breakfast that morning, she provided a full answer to his question. The fact that everyone else knows he’s about to be fired is useful information for Ricky to have. In our world Tina Fey’s behavior would be tactless, but if the setting is a universe where everyone always shares all relevant information when asked then she behaved perfectly appropriately.

*In a world where no one expects anyone else to spare their feelings with white lies, why should she hide the fact that she isn’t planning to have sex with her date?

On the subject of truth-telling in fiction, IIRC in one of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books there’s a reference to a trial where a witness was asked to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth…and does. The whole truth about EVERYTHING. It takes a long time for him to finish giving his testimony.