Lying vs false statement — three axes, five cells
A statement hangs on three independent axes:
- Truth value (semantic): does it match the world — "false statement" speaks only to this axis.
- Speaker belief (doxastic): does the speaker hold it true.
- Assertoric force (pragmatic): is it put forward AS true — Frege's force, speech-act assertion; Brandom's version: asserting = publicly undertaking a commitment to its truth.
Lying = axes 2+3: asserting while believing false. Truth value is NOT in the definition — you can lie and happen to say something true.
| asserted? | believed true? | actually true? | name |
|---|---|---|---|
| yes | no | either | lie |
| yes | yes | no | honest error (the student's wrong answer) |
| yes | yes | yes | misleading (deceive via implicature: "I haven't slept with her" — lately) |
| suspended | — | no | fiction / hypothesis (no assertion, so no lie and no error) |
| yes-ish | indifferent | indifferent | bullshit (Frankfurt): produced with no regard for truth — the liar tracks truth in order to negate it; the bullshitter never looks |
Two payoffs
Atmosphere marketing lives below the assertion layer. A Rolex ad asserts nothing — a champion wearing a watch is a picture, not a proposition. No assertion → off the truth axis → nothing to fact-check, no lie to catch. The real assertion ("buying this makes me successful") is confabulated by the buyer — the assertoric debt is booked to the audience's own account. This is the complete legal structure of the vacancy strategy; feature claims, by contrast, enter the truth axis the moment they speak, and can be falsified. (See confabulation-in-marketing.)
LLM confabulation has exact coordinates: false statement, no lie. The model lacks axis 2 (no belief to contradict) and its axis 3 is disputed (assertion, or Frankfurt bullshit — fluent production indifferent to truth?). Which is why verification machinery that only reads axis 1 and ignores sincerity entirely is the philosophically correct governance for belief-free asserters.
Kin: the-lying-criterion · abduction.