>Your statements can be 100% truthful, and yet not reveal all of your thoughts about a subject or situation. Having a filter doesn't make you dishonest. Some of your thoughts are unkind, some can be even downright evil at times. The fact that you don't reveal these things is often a sign of self control. Words have power, and they affect others around you. There's a reason everyone can't hear every thought you have.

Absolutely 100% true.

>I could answer with "thank you for making it"

You are carefully crafting a response to the question to make everyone believe that you liked the food without directly stating that. I believe this is completely morally equivalent to leading everyone to believe you liked the food by directly stating it.

I believe that neither one of these things is immoral in any way in the particular case.

Let's say she doesn't accept your dancing around the question? Are you going to keep crafting answers that are technically correct in attempt to make everyone think you liked the food?

I don't think it's wrong if you do so, but I do think that the effect is completely the same as if you'd just said it was great.

> >I could answer with "thank you for making it"

> You are carefully crafting a response to the question to make everyone believe that you liked the food without directly stating that.

NO -- see that's the problem. You're making a huge assumption that is incorrect.

"thank you for making it" does not mean "I liked it". And no, it won't make everyone believe that I liked the food (especially since that would not have been my intention in the first place). People aren't stupid. Most folks I know would realize in that situation that I wasn't directly answering the question. "thank you for making it" would not have been dishonest, and it would not mean "I liked the food".

> "Let's say she doesn't accept your dancing around the question? Are you going to keep crafting answers that are technically correct in attempt to make everyone think you liked the food?"

Firstly, you are wrong in your assessment that I would be attempting to make everyone think I liked the food -- in that situation that would not be my intention at all.

Secondly, if I was pressed I might try to move on with the conversation in a different way (without answering) -- which, again would not be dishonest. Not wanting to answer a question is not the same thing as dishonesty. I am not required to tell everyone what I think about everything in order to be honest.

If she kept pressing the question, I might try to answer the question nicely, like "It wasn't my favorite", or "I didn't care for it". Both of those answers would be honest. Being kind is not dishonesty, either. Even if it was one of the worst meals I'd ever eaten, both of those statements would be truthful.

"the effect is completely the same as if you'd just said it was great." -- No, I totally disagree with that. "It was great" would be a lie, "thank you for making it" expresses genuine gratitide for the effort made toward the meal.

You make it sound as though it is impossible to be tactful and truthful/honest at the same time. I disagree.

[ edited to remove a typo ]

Is it more of a lie to make a statement that is literally true but the meaning is incorrectly interpreted, or more of a lie to make a statement that is literally untrue but the meaning is correctly interpreted?

Phrased another way, in software, does one insist on clinging to a protocol's specification if 90% of the implementations misinterpret it, or does one violate the specification in order to ensure that 90% of the implementations interpret it the correct way?

While this debate is occasionally relevant, we know that adapting software to the implementation is the only way to be effective. This is true with people too.

There is a lot of emphasis on tone, but that itself is one of these "social lies" we're discussing. The reality is that people don't care so much about tone as they care about hearing what they want to hear. An overwhelmingly positive tone to deliver a negative message will merely make someone hate you more.

The only way to "tactfully" deliver bad news is to deliver it so ambiguously that it isn't really clear what's happening (and maybe this isn't bad, as it gives the recipient time to mull over the possibilities and gradually adapt to the negative information, rather than getting hit like a ton of bricks).

Anything else will give a negative reaction, and your careful literalist wording that is technically "not a lie" will be interpreted as pomposity, arrogance, and additional deception, despite the extra intellectual effort you dumped into crafting a literally sanitary response.

This is hard to deal with, because it's the exact opposite of the intention for people who are naturally linguistic thinkers, like you and me. We put in the mental effort to be legally and technically correct and it just gets misinterpreted, often silently because "normal" people don't want to or necessarily know how to rebut the statement verbally -- they're content that your "hostility" was conveyed by making any statement that wasn't overwhelmingly positive.

This dichotomy is why lawyers are traditionally reviled. Their profession is linguistic trickery, minutia, and pedantry.

You can approach communication at the surface level of the verbatim information exchange, or you can approach it at the emotional level of ensuring that it conveys the intended, actual sentiment to the people receiving the information. Much of the time, unfortunately, we can't have both.

In my opinion, answering with "thank you for making it" should be equivalent in everyone else's brains to "well, that wasn't very good".

Social consequences will ensue regardless of you stating it or not. In this situation, as in many others, a lack of positive reaction is considered a negative reaction.

It all boils down to ego and believing others don't have a reason to look down at you just because you didn't directly state that the food was bad, while in reality you actually maneuvered your way out of the question to willingly avoid this, which is even more selfish.

Maybe something is being lost in the lack of tone, but I don't in any way believe that anwsering "thank you for making it" could be construed as being selfish.

And it has absolutely nothing to do with ego, it's about being kind to others.

Tone has nothing to do with the fact that you were asked a question and you responded with a non-answer. And anyone can notice that, and the intention there-in.

There is simply no way anyone could perceive this as not dodging the question in order to not state what you truly think. This is why I consider it a worse behavior (and with a certainly worse outcome) than just simply lying and saying something along the lines of "it was good, thanks".

In the end, you could either

a) Lie directly ("it was great")

b) Lie by omission ("thank you for making it")

c) Be ruthlessly truthful ("it was pretty bad")

d) Be truthful, but tactful ("it was alright / I've had better, but it's very much appreciated")

In my opinion, b is definitely a worse social behavior than a. Yes, you blatantly lie in case a, but that is a lie with a justifiable goal: making someone else feel better.

Case b is still lying to some degree, and here you are half-lying in your own selfish interest: you want to think high of yourself because you didn't say an outright lie, while still trying not to hurt someone else's feelings. In other words, it's the response someone with needs for self-justification would choose. The worst/best thing is that this behavior is easily perceived, and its motives inferred: worst for the respondent; best for others, who can see her/him for what she/he is.

It's not selfish at all, however anyone who isn't a complete idiot will realize that it's a dodge to answering the question of whether you liked the food. You risk an uncomfortable exchange and negative social consequences with a move like this. It's much easier to just lie and tell granny that her crappy food was good and move on to another topic. And really, saying "it was good" isn't a complete lie: it could have been worse, much worse (assuming the food didn't give you food poisoning or kill you outright), and "good" is a relative term.

Some might see it as question dodging, which often implies the negative.

There's a difference between avoiding answering a question to prevent hurting someone's feelings, and doing so just to put yourself in a positive light (for selfish reasons). The scenario I was envisioning was the former.

Yeah I understand that some people try to spin everything their way, and I know it's annoying. My point was that just because someone doesn't answer a question or doesn't tell you everything they think in a situation, that doesn't mean that they are being dishonest.

In this scenario you were asked one question, but answered another when saying "thank you for making it", because you didn't want to deal with the social fallout of actually telling the truth to the original question.

I don't see how that's not mental gymnastics to say it's not lieing, which seems like a big divide in this thread

It's actually very simple, and not at all mental gymnastics.

It's not a lie because I didn't say something that was not true.

Again you are saying that me not answering a question is equivalent to me lying, and you are simply wrong about that. They are not the same thing.

Talking to people is not computer code. In this admittedly contrived situation, they are looking for you to say it's good. You give an answer _to a different question_. Either people realize and you've violated the social expectation or they don't realize and you've misdirected them. Avoiding the question in a way that's misleading people has the same result as a lie even if not technically the same thing

If you refused to answer the question in this statement that's not lieing. If you said "no, it wasn't good" that wouldn't be lieing.

The entire camp of people in this thread with your viewpoint are acting like a stereotypical genie where as long as everything you say is technically accurate you have done nothing wrong even when you are will full disregarding the extra layers of meaning that are part of human to human conversation

You didn't say that talking to people was like computer code, you are describing talking to people like it's computer code so it is relevant.

>Also, saying "thank you for making it" isn't answering a question at all, so it isn't "answering a different question".

Saying that you're not lieing because you are haven't said something that is false out of context, but is still misleading _on purpose_ is the most pedantic thing I have heard all year.

And just don't reply if you are going to be done with a discussion, telling people you might not bother replying to them is condescending and uncivil for this board

> You didn't say that talking to people was like computer code, you are describing talking to people like it's computer code so it is relevant.

That's your opinion, which I disagree with. So from my view it is still irrelevant. I'm willing to agree to disagree on that point.

> And just don't reply if you are going to be done with a discussion, telling people you might not bother replying to them is condescending and uncivil for this board

There was nothing uncivil, nor condescending about what I said. I just said I would continue to disagree even if I didn't continue the conversation.

I think we've pretty much beaten this disagreement to death, and it's time for me to move on.

>That's your opinion, which I disagree with. So from my view it is still irrelevant.

It's not irrelevant just because you disagree with it. That's not what irrelevant means. It would be irrelevant if the truth or falsehood of the statement had no impact on the rest of the argument.

>I think we've pretty much beaten this disagreement to death, and it's time for me to move on.

Then just move on...stop trying to get the last word in. (I'm not the person you were replying).

Dishonesty is about misleading somebody, regardless of what you say. You can say 100% truthful things and still mislead people, which is still dishonest. A common method of dishonesty is by omitting important things. We are saying that we feel that your response is sidestepping the question asked of you, which is dishonest by omission, because this omission misleads. Communication is about more than the words you say.

While it is true that you can mislead by omission, every ommission of information is not an attempt to be dishonest.

Sometimes you just don't want people to know one way or the other. That is the scenario I described.

Many in this thread say that not answering is dishonesty, and ascribe my not answering the question to intending to lead my wife's grandmother to believe that I liked her food.

As I believe I pointed out earlier, my intention would not be to lead her to believe that I thought it was either good or bad -- I was not going to reveal the answer at all.

Leaving someone in the dark with no intention of pushing them to incorrect assumptions is not dishonesty.

Also, people can make incorrect assumptions about what is meant by what is said, even when the speaker has no intention of them making those assumptions.

It is the intention of the speaker that makes omission of information honest or dishonest.

My point is that some people will always see avoiding answering questions negatively, no matter what way you feel it should be seen. You can’t control how other people interpret your acitons or intentions, they may not match up with what you want, and in my personal experience, people tend to see avoiding answering a question (either by sidestepping it or by counter-questioning) negatively, if they notice it.