What process in the mind results in truth?

[Brickjectivity]

What compels us to lie or tell the truth? Is it based upon all the various emotional pressures we feel? I lean towards this but am willing to reconsider. Is there an actual facility for truth in a person or not? I know that people can become deluded, unable to consider the truth about particular issues. There are also those who seem to hate lies, but is that not due to how they feel and would they not be equally amenable to lies if their emotions drove them to be?

 

[sayak83]

What compels us to lie or tell the truth? Is it based upon all the various emotional pressures we feel? I lean towards this but am willing to reconsider. Is there an actual facility for truth in a person or not? I know that people can become deluded, unable to consider the truth about particular issues. There are also those who seem to hate lies, but is that not due to how they feel and would they not be equally amenable to lies if their emotions drove them to be?

Telling the truth in a job interview.

"I know the job is sh**t and boring and the company sucks big time. But the money is ok, and since nobody wants to pay me to watch play video games on You Tube... I need the job for the dough. So please shut up and gimme."

That would go down well..

 

[Sunstone]

The most reliable methods for discerning truth have always been those that relied on reason, rather than on any inward sense of what is true or false. Thinking something is true merely because it "feels true" is a nearly certain way of being taken in and made a sucker. Reasoning your way to the truth is much more reliable.

However, reasoning is still very much imperfect. It is fraught with cognitive biases and other pitfalls. Like someone who has only a hammer with which to drive screws, we are a bit like a person forced to use a tool (reason) that is not perfect for the task assigned to it (discerning truth).

Obviously reason did not evolve purely for the purpose of discerning truth, but for some other purpose.

I rather favor Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber's hypothesis that reasoning evolved in our species of great ape in order to help us (1) persuade others to help us, and (2) to help us figure out when someone is likely lying to us or likely telling the truth. Notice there is a subtle distinction between discerning the truth and discerning when someone is telling the truth. Reason evolved for the latter function, rather than the former. In practice, that means it evolved along with all sorts of cognitive biases and other imperfections that would presumably have been weeded out if it had evolved solely to discern truth.

An implication of Mercier and Sperber's hypothesis is that we reason best when our reasoning is "peer reviewed" so to speak, because we are quite often blind to our own biases, etc, but not as much to other's biases.

 

[Sunstone]

There are also those who seem to hate lies....

I read some many years ago that the hatred of lies is born of a fear of being wrong, and that only about 15% of the population are significantly or consistently motivated by that fear. The rest -- 85% of the population -- doesn't really hate lies per se, but rather hate only those lies that they perceive might harm them in some way or another. I'm not sure whether that's perfectly true or not, but I suspect the 15%/85% figure has some resemblance to reality.

 

[Nous]

I rather favor Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber's hypothesis that reasoning evolved in our species of great ape in order to help us (1) persuade others to help us, and (2) to help us figure out when someone is likely lying to us or likely telling the truth.

But other hominids and other species engage in behaviors that indicate the use of abstract reasoning: Animal cognition - Wikipedia See especially the section "Reasoning and problem solving". On what grounds should one conclude that reasoning evolved differently or for different purposes in Homo?

 

[Sunstone]

But other hominids and other species engage in behaviors that indicate the use of abstract reasoning: Animal cognition - Wikipedia See especially the section "Reasoning and problem solving". On what grounds should one conclude that reasoning evolved differently or for different purposes in Homo?

Do we know that other animals have the same cognitive biases and such as we do?

 

[Nous]

Do we know that other animals have the same cognitive biases and such as we do?

Hopefully other animals do not have the same cognitive biases as humans do. But why shouldn't reasoning among Homo have evolved for the same reasons as it did in other hominids--fishing the terminites out of the logs?

 

[Aupmanyav]

Analysis - Viveka.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

What compels us to lie or tell the truth?

I suppose that people lie because they have something to hide - maybe an unstated agenda or something they've done that they prefer remain concealed.

Incidentally, I'm not including deceptions done with good intent, such as concealing a surprise birthday party by deliberately misinforming a loved one. I'm only referring to immoral lying, by which I mean deceiving somebody to your advantage at their expense. This includes not only actively stating something known to be false, but any other form of deliberate deception such as choosing words that it is hoped will create a false impression even if the words are technically correct, or lying by omission.

Why tell the truth? It's an easier, more serene life if you can live it, and it's the right thing to do. If one lives an upright life with noble pursuits, there is no need to lie.

Sunstone commented that perhaps 85% of people don't care if they are lied to. I'm in the 15%. For me, it's one strike and you're out. We nearly rented a place to a woman whose reference told us that she smoked. We were willing to rent to her (the property has never been smoked in) if she agreed to do all of her smoking outside. When the rental agent asked her about smoking, she denied being a smoker. Next. It wasn't the smoking - it was the lie. How could we ever trust her not to smoke indoors or not to do anything else she felt was in her interest at our expense?

The topic of discerning the truth is a different discussion.

 

[Brickjectivity]

The topic of discerning the truth is a different discussion.

Yes, though I am also interested in how its possible to deceive oneself and also to be honest with oneself. There are many examples of self deception, but the simplest might be when we misplace something and assume it must have been stolen. Angry people perceive an attack from a look rather than a friendly stare. Rose colored glasses make us overlook bad actions sometimes or to imagine someone will always have good intentions.