Half-truth
A half-truth is a
Purpose
The purpose and or consequence of a half-truth is to make something that is really only a
Examples
- The classic story about blind men and an elephant. Each blind man touches a different part of the elephant and reaches a different conclusion about the nature of the elephant; while each man's experience of the elephant is accurate, none of them have a full understanding of the nature of the beast. One may be touching the tail and believe that the elephant is long and thin, another may be touching the belly and say that it is round and big.
- Former U.S. President Bill Clinton famously engaged in a half-truth when he gave the testimony of "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky." Here he engaged in an equivocation fallacy to deliberately indicate one particular meaning of the phrase "sexual relations", while intending another meaning, in order to deliberately mislead the court while still being able to later claim that "my statements were technically correct."
Politics
Some forms of half-truths are an inescapable part of politics in representative democracies. The reputation of a political candidate can be irreparably damaged if they are exposed in a lie, so a complex style of language has evolved to minimise the chance of this happening. If someone has not said something, they cannot be accused of lying. As a consequence, politics has become a world where half-truths are expected, and political statements are rarely accepted at face value.[4]
William Safire defines a half-truth, for political purposes, as "a statement accurate enough to require an explanation; and the longer the explanation, the more likely a public reaction of half-belief".[5]
It has been shown that the order of the half-truth makes a difference in reported belief in the statement. That is when a statement begins with a true statement followed by another unrelated statement (either true or false), the statement is believed. However, when the false statement is put in front, then the entire package is less believed regardless if the second part of the argument is true or false.[6] This also indicates the anchoring effect, which is a tendency of people to believe the first thing said which acts as an anchor point in believing, or disbelieving, what follows and is also found in reference pricing used in price promotions. Consumer behaviour and psychology studies show the heavy influence of the order and presentation of information in what beliefs people generally may be likely to form as well as decoy items that may be the early information.[7][8]
In his 1990 work The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of 1989 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Prague, Timothy Garton Ash responded to Václav Havel's call for "living in truth":
Now we expect many things of politicians in a well-functioning parliamentary democracy. But "living in truth" is not one of them. In fact the essence of democratic politics might rather be described as "working in half-truth". Parliamentary democracy is, at its heart, a system of limited adversarial mendacity, in which each party attempts to present part of the truth as if it were the whole.[9]
Philosopher Alfred North Whitehead was quoted as saying: "There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that play the devil".[10] If this is true, statements, or truths, which according to Whitehead are all half-truths, are susceptible to creating deceptive and false conclusions.
Meme theory
Quotations
The notion of half-truths has existed in various cultures, giving rise to several epigrammatic sayings.
- Karl Kraus, an Austrian journalist, critic, playwright, and poet, noted, "An aphorism can never be the whole truth; it is either a half-truth or a truth-and-a-half."[12]
- Arthur Koestler, a Hungarian-British author and journalist, wrote, "Two half-truths do not make a truth, and two half-cultures do not make a culture."[13]
Selective truth
Selective truth is an act of telling some part of truth selectively, both intentionally or unintentionally. [14]
Both intentional and unintentional selective truth are not a truth at all. [15]
Ethics and morality
While selective truth information is not the truth information, whether telling selective truth is considered as
See also
- Alternative facts
- Casuistry
- Degree of truth
- Economical with the truth
- Fallacy of the single cause
- Fuzzy logic
- Jesuiticalanswer
- Jumping to conclusions
- Lie
- Limited hangout
- Minimisation (psychology)
- Modified limited hangout
- Multi-valued logic
- Omission bias
- Political correctness
- Principle of bivalence
- Quoting out of context
- Sophistry
- Truthiness
- Weasel word
- Cherry picking
References
- ^ "Merriam Webster Definition of Half-truth, August 1, 2007". M-w.com. 2012-08-31. Retrieved 2013-10-02.
- .
- ^ "MDPI – Publisher of Open Access Journals".
- ^ Crystal, David (2003). The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. Cambridge University Press. p. 378.
- ^ William Safire (1968). The New Language of Politics: An Anecdotal Dictionary of Catchwords, Slogans, and Political Usage. Random House.
- .
- ^ https://www.fca.org.uk/publication/occasional-papers/occasional-paper-1.pdf, pp. 14-20.
- ^ "Why Advertising Falls Flat in Individuals with Autism | Psychology Today".
- ISBN 0-415-16949-6.
- ^ Alfred North Whitehead, Dialogues, 1954: Prologue.
- ^ Brodie, Richard (1996). Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme. Integral Press, Seattle. p. 51.
- ^ As quoted in Thomas Szasz, Anti-Freud: Karl Kraus's Criticism of Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry, 1990, p. 157.
- ^ As quoted in Jonathon Green, Says who?: a guide to the quotations of the century, 1988, p. 451.
- ^ a b "Selective Truth-Telling". Gillott Communication. Archived from the original on 2023-03-16.
- ^ a b "The devious art of lying by telling the truth". BBC. Archived from the original on 2023-03-09.
- ^ "TRUTH TELLING". Center of Health Ethics, School of Medicine, University of Missouri. Archived from the original on 2023-03-10.
External links
- SNSF research project Half-Truths. Truth, Fiction and Conspiracy in the 'Post-Factual Age', led by Prof. Dr. Nicola Gess (University of Basel, CH).
- Lying with Statistics – Examples of abuse of statistical, mathematical and scientific principles
- Half-Truths and the Development of Tax Policy Archived 2015-02-20 at the Wayback Machine