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Certainty about lying is suspect because the practice is extraordinarily complex. Discussions of the subject usually begin with the assumption that everyone present agrees on what a lie actually is. A lie happens, a rough definition might assert, when someone does not tell the truth. Unfortunately, the relationship between lying and the truth is nowhere near this simple. A false statement need not be a lie. "The earth is flat," coming from a member of the Flat Earth Society, is not a lie but a statement of belief. Furthermore, a true statement can be a lie. Imagine a dishonest agent telling a client, "The check is in the mail," and then discovering to his horror that his new secretary has actually . . . mailed the check. Even though his client got paid, the agent intended to lie.
So objective truth is an unreliable standard against which lies can be measured. Most lies, of course, involve a distortion of the truth, but so do many innocent remarks. And the notorious difficulty of getting at the truth works to the liar's advantage; since there are so many different versions of reality floating around, another one, invented, won't do any harm -- and may even be more entertaining to boot.
Fortunately, there is a way out of this logical blind alley. All lies, regardless of their relationship to the truth, have one thing in common. "We must single out," writes Sissela Bok in Lying, "from the countless ways in which we blunder misinformed through life, that which is done with the intention to mislead." Lies may confuse everyone who hears them, as they are meant to, but liars know exactly what they are doing while they are doing it. In Telling Lies, Paul Ekman, a professor of psychology at the University of California medical school in San Francisco, provides a slightly more elaborate definition: "One person intends to mislead another, doing so deliberately, without prior notification of this purpose, and without having been explicitly asked to do so by the target. There are two primary ways to lie: to conceal and to falsify."
Ekman's formula is helpful, within limits. It defines the contexts in which lies are or are not improper. It absolves actors and fiction writers, for example, whose professions involve fabrications but whose audiences are presumably aware of this condition before they go to the theater or open a book. But problems arise with Ekman's notion that lying can be an act of concealment alone. Is not publicizing the possible dangers, say, of silicone breast implants in and of itself a lie? Or does this concealment merely set the stage for the true, dangerous deception, the impression created by the manufacturer in the enforced absence of information that such implants are safe? When a wife asks her husband how his day went, is he obliged to answer, "Great -- I spent the lunch hour in a motel room with my mistress"? If he does not disclose this detail, is he guilty of lying, or is he -- the cheat -- simply sparing his wife's feelings or avoiding a potentially unpleasant scene?
Not everyone agrees on the answers to these and similar questions. Every lie -- save those of self-deception -- involves two or more people in an intricate arabesque of intentions and expectations. What does the person telling a lie hope to achieve? How do the recipients of the lie understand it? What, in short, do all the parties involved think is happening?