That level of certainty would have to pretty much agree with accepted reality, and revising upon learning something different is a good thing. We can accept that we were wrong about something without making liars out of ourselves if there is a consensus. This doesn’t apply though to things that are blatantly factual, and easily looked up. I’m thinking more about “stuff everyone knows” than obscure things that are easy to be mistaken about.
The bit I bolded renders the word lie meaningless. If the person honestly believes that iguanas suck the blood of babies in the night, he cannot be lying. His statement is untrue, but that’s a different thing. Otherwise, Aristotle was revealed to be a liar by Galileo, and Newton by Einstein.
Perhaps I spoke over hastily. I need to review my position on this. Ignorance has different levels, and I think that lie still applies to some, but not others.
NOT the first one (“A lie is any objectively untrue statement whose untruth is known to the speaker or writer”), since that would brand fiction, jokes, etc. as lies. If the hearer knows it’s not true, and the speaker knows the hearer knows this, and there’s no intent to deceive, there’s no lie.
I would not use the word “lie” (except possibly modified, as in “lie of omission”) in a case where the person does not actually tell an untruth, so this rules out “A lie is any verbal attempt to deceive, regardless of the objective truth of the statement” and “An answer to a question that leaves out pertinent info not asked for can be a lie.” Which is not to say there’s nothing wrong with doing so, necessarily—just that I wouldn’t use the word “lying” to describe it.
Honest expressions of opinion, presented as such, are not lies. However, if someone says something like “I know for a fact that God hates fags”—whether the “I know for a fact” part is explicit or implicit—then they’re lying.
I was just paraphrasing what someone else believed.
I just don’t see how you can decouple intent from lying.
My signature is not objectively true, but it’s not an intent to deceive, because I don’t expect anyone to take it seriously. Is it a lie?
Here’s an interesting one for you guys to kick around.
Years ago a coworker met a guy from a personal ad. She said “He said he had brown hair, but he was bald. He lied to me.”
Did he?
Yeah. Good point.
How about this:
- An attempt to deceive or manipulate through (a) statements known to be untrue or (b) statements presented as facts that basic research would show to be untrue or (c) statements, implications or suggestions that lead someone to an erroneous understanding.
Item “b” is suppose to cover politicians making declarations about things they have not researched. If you state that Saturn is 90% argon, it qualifies as a lie whether or not you know the chemicial composition of Saturn.
Item “c” covers things like:
“I did stop smoking Mom!”
(For 20 minutes in the 1990s.)
I am the OP, and it isn’t. Not exclusively, anywhistle.
I did this once for an extended period of time. Back during EQ1’s prime, around 2002, people still used to play mostly same-sex characters in MMOs and guilds didn’t use VOIP programs, so when I played a female dark elf cleric people assumed I was female in real life as well. I never lied about it but people never asked, and when I talked about things I did in real life I selectively told only about those things that might make me seem like a female. I never referred to my own or my roommate’s sex and my two RL friends in the guild didn’t either - instead of “he” or “she” they used my character’s name. At one point one non-guildie friend actually asked whether I was a girl or a guy, but he was so drunk when he did he didn’t remember asking about it the next day even though I told him the truth.
It was sort of a game to me I guess, a game that would have been very boring if I had actually allowed myself to lie. Eventually I got sort of bored with it and after nine months in the guild there was a “RL picture” thread on the guild’s forums and I posted my picture. The reactions were rather hilarious. 
And before anybody asks, no I didn’t cyber anybody during my carreer as a fake female. :o
IMO it depends on the definition of “basic research.” But keeping yourself deliberately uninformed so that you can make advantageous claims counts as a lie in my book. (Baal’s Big Book of Lies)
My memory of the specifics has faded, but for the GWBush administration to present aluminum tubes as components of WMDs when “basic research” would demonstrate otherwise counts as lying.
Is it lying when someone sends out an ignorant press secretary to make his deceptive claims for him? The line gets fuzzy eventually, but when intention is deception or manipulation (apart from entertainment) then I’ll lean toward calling the person above the press secretary a liar.
I’d say that the press secretary’s boss was lying, but the PS himself or herself was not.
That last should be "not necessarily. If the press secretary knows she or he is being kept ignorant of certain things and reasonably suspects that the version of events being told may be untrue, she or he is lying.
But how many times can someone play the plausible deniability card before being labeled incompetent?
As a press secretary? Probably an infinite number of times, depending on how you see the press secretary’s job as being defined. I never expected Dana Perino to be involved in policy-making discussions or anything like that; her job was to communicate the president’s message (and perhaps be distractingly cute).
If you see the PS’s job as akin to a reporter’s, obviously very few times. But the PS isn’t a journalist by any stretch of the imagination.
Any untrue statement that should, by any reasonable means, be known as untrue to the speaker. Some people will insist that black is white, and for some damn reason, they believe it, despite being shown, mathematically proven, and sworn to it by their priest.
They should, by any reasonable means, know this to be untrue, but they refuse to admit it. It’s still a lie.
On the other hand, there are ‘over-simplifications’ where part of a statement is untrue or inaccurate, because you are trying to explain something else. That’s sort of not a lie.
Wait… We can choose more than one?
Is there some way I can go back and add to my choices? 
A lie is an untrue statement that was known to be untrue to the person who originally stated it. It’s an important distintion since it’s possible to tell a lie without lying, so to speak, if you’re repeating someone else’s lie, believing it to be the truth.
“God hates fags” isn’t an opinion. It’s a fact with debatable truth value. “Ice-cream is delicious” is an opinion, because it’s subjective.
Is this a whoosh that’s causing my hair to fall out? Of course he did.
I suppose the counter is that perhaps his hair was naturally brown, and the fact that he was bereft of it does not change the fact that his hair “is brown” in that sense, or that the hair elsewhere on his body was brown. But our co worker (from what information you’ve given) was deliberately given the impression he had a head of brown hair.