The Law of Universal Mendacity

Chapter 1
PROBLEMS WITH PROBLEMS

Can you force anyone to be honest?  You can’t force everyone to be honest and it is difficult to persuade them; but we can always avoid being dupes.  Common sense?  A few words of warning: the unfamiliar may accompany  feelings of skepticism but you may also recognize an elemental truth.  The reader is invited to exercise skepticism and that is even recommended as proof of what is written.  Common sense is a poor guide, and if you become uncomfortable, you would do well to analyze exactly what it is that bothers you.  The opposites that are intended and experienced in assertions are not in fact contradictory, and the reasons why are illustrated and explained.

Like the philosopher Bernard Williams^[i], we believe in truth and honesty and we do so because credibility is our aim; but perhaps unlike him, we do not expect to find it, not even professionally - even though our profession is different from his.  Our stance is descriptive and reflective.  In life, it is usually not possible to explain to others the complexities of our arrangements or belief systems and we expect others to suffer the same limitations as we do.  We adapt to informants - as we must when speaking to children, for example.  More generally, the recognition of a need sometimes to communicate ideas and situations - at whatever level of complexity - in fact imposes moral imperatives.  Philosophers who need credibility from critical audiences had better be right and honest if ridicule is to be avoided; but for the wider perspectives of life, of knowledge, and of religion, there is a complementary need for understanding what is being offered in the form of assertions.  If I want to be believed here, I had better say it honestly; but I am also reflecting on the limitations of this approach for the philosophical parts of normal man or woman in the wider perspective. 

We shall illustrate how, from the Law of Universal Mendacity, propositional calculi are abstracted by a process of closure.  The abstraction of geometry creates propositions that are simply true or simply false.  Operating beyond this type of abstraction, the Law of Universal Mendacity is not a physical law; but it results from the way, in nature, we are informed about states of  affairs.  Its model is not the knowledge of geometrical theorems based on axioms, whether self-evident or contrived; rather the opposite as will become evident.

The book attempts a state of mind that will help in answering several questions experienced by thinking people of our time. What can you believe?  What is a lie?  Are white lies reprehensible?  Can honesty survive?  Is cynicism the trait of the fittest?  Is morality immature or out-of-date?  These questions underlie our great trauma - one that continues to subsume many of the best movie stories.  How did the second world war occur?  How were so many deceived?  How did allegedly civilized people do such barbaric things to each other?  Has anything changed?  Because of space and time constraints I offer only a constructive attitude; the next step is yours.

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CHAPTER 2
THE LAW OF UNIVERSAL MENDACITY

Words contain real meanings that oppose their intended meanings.  The Law reflects back on itself with a double opposite: in opposing reality, words have intended meanings.  Rightly understood, these assertions are not contradictory.  In the fact of assertion, an intended meaning is one part of the whole.  Strictly, the Law applies to assertions and not to statements of propositions^[ii].  As we understand them, propositions are either true or false; but there is always some truth in the opposite of an assertion and often the context supplies a stronger and contrary truth than was intended.  When you read Universal Mendacity, capitalized, we are referring to this Law.

Did you ask what is meant by “intended”?  Why did you ask?  Your intention is your reason for speaking or asserting.

You can review where we’re headed by scanning the contents page. In a later chapter we’ll consider the paradigm of knowledge, in science, and we’ll elaborate subsequently with further examples and implications.

2.1        Nowhere are the contradictions inherent in assertions more celebrated than in public life.  When the president says “We’ll get ‘em,” you note his determination but ask, “When? Where? Can he? Ever? And the weapons of mass destruction?”  Many political promises, perhaps even most, have been broken because they were too wishful - for speakers and l