I'm Not Telling You

Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?  There's a lot more being asked here than whether you agree not to lie, this question is deliberately phrased to try and prevent you from being misleading, or at least hold you to account if you are found to be doing so.  The first bit is simple, "do you swear to tell the truth", that bit is simple enough to understand.  The second bit "the whole truth" brings light to the fact that you can lie without actually saying anything, by withholding information that would contradict what you have said or anything else that you know of that may lead to an alternative conclusion.  The last bit, "and nothing but the truth" is concerned with plausible deniability, that is to say things which you can say and claim to believe are true, which in reality are not, but you can plausibly deny any knowledge that you were aware this was untrue.

When we think about lying, beyond a court of law, we have to take what most people say at face value because we know very little about them as a person or enough about their behaviour and character traits to be able to make an accurate assessment of whether or not they are lying.  There are books like those by Joe Navarro, a former FBI agent that detail techniques you can use to read body language in order to get an idea of what is going on inside their mind, or to be able to read whether or not they are telling the truth.  The thing about books like this is that this is a form of Pseudo-Science, that is to say most theories that centre around these concepts are "fuzzy" and cannot be held to be true in all scenarios.  Things like whether or not an individual makes eye contact or avoids eye contact for example can be affected by many different factors, some emotional, some psychological, and some are indeed centred around honesty or dishonesty as the case may be.

Taking eye contact as an example, it is a misconception that someone who is lying will avoid your gaze; in normal interaction we rarely make eye contact with people because such an act is intimate.  In fact it is often said that if someone makes eye contact with you and maintains it, they either want to fuck you or kill you.  Eye contact as an indicator of truthfulness is often misconstrued, most people believe the misconception that avoiding eye contact means dishonesty and intentional eye contact means honesty, the reverse is actually true insofar as the theory of body language goes, if someone intentionally looks at you when telling you something, they are much more likely to be lying to you and trying to convince you otherwise.  There is another axiom often attributed to the fictional character Sherlock Holmes thanks in part to the BBC series, whereby detail is an indicator of dishonesty, the truth is simple, only lies have complexity - this again doesn't always hold as true but does serve as a general guide.

For me personally, my Nystagmus causes my eyes to constantly move.  People often notice this and they have a tendency to stare when they do, so in general I avoid eye contact and don't usually look at people, rather I look in their general direction but focus on something else close to them.  This can be misleading if you intend to use it as an indicator of truthfulness.  Perhaps my own intimate understanding of the complexities of social interaction and the impact our own mental state, confidence, and emotions can have upon it has led me to be more critical of those who want to simplify things to basic rules of proposition where if X then Y, or perhaps it is simply the realisation that body language is a Pseudo-Science.

Pseudo-Science is something which claims to be a scientific study, it often has evidence that backs it up, but the distinction between this and the scientific method in general is that a theory within the general scientific method if shown to be untrue is no longer accepted as true.  Pseudo-Science on the other hand often ignores any evidence to the contrary.  This leads to beliefs that are really just opinions - informed ones but still opinions, being accepted as fact.  This doesn't hold up to logical scrutiny but those who subscribe to these beliefs often do not perform even basic research into these fields before accepting what they say as true.  Body language in particular is something that I find interesting as an indicator of thought processes but after some basic research many years ago, reading books by authority figures on the subject, I realised that the conclusions that are presented vary widely depending on who you ask.

Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?  Perhaps the most important part of this question is the middle, "the whole truth" and all that implies.  It is hard to imagine that any individual who claims to be an expert in their field is completely oblivious to what other so called experts in their field also have to say.  If you have any field of study or any line of fascination that you pursue in your life, you will encounter many different points of view and you will inevitably become involved in arguments that at times can feel like they go on forever.  Who you believe is not always an easy choice to make, especially when it comes to fields of study that have no empirical answer to their fundamental questions.  If the answer to any question given is always "it depends..." then you're dealing with something that either cannot be defined precisely, or must be met with a line of inquisition that takes a different approach - in other words if you can't get a simple answer, then your question is too complex.  Break it down into smaller more definitive points that precise answers can be given for.

The most interesting thing that we learn when we ask people questions and receive answers often is not what they say, but rather what they do not tell us which we later find out they already knew.  In the UK we have a number of pieces of legislation that centre around the Freedom of Information [FOI], these allow individuals to submit requests to public bodies which must then be fulfilled.  These FOI requests can reveal quite a lot of information that these bodies held and were aware of, despite such information never being presented in their publications.  Some of the most interesting facts in the UK political environment do not come from what we are told, but what we later find out they already knew and never said.