You ignored the issue as to whether the mechanic lied, which was kind of important. How about we make it more applicable to this conversation. I ask you what it would take for you to accept that I'm right. You reply, "You have to prove to me I'm wrong." So I prove to you that you are wrong, but you do not accept my proof. As far as I'm concerned, I have met your condition but you failed to accept it anyway, which by your logic means that you lied when you set up the conditions. It, of course, makes no sense whatsoever for me to assume this. I can't assume that you lied simply because the outcome was not what I expected! Why is this? Let's go back to your dictionary: "Lie, n. Something meant to deceive or give a wrong impression." To deceive means that there needs to be intention behind the deception. Was there an intention to lie when you laid out your (hypothetical) conditions? No, of course not. Was the HR director trying to deceive the applicant? What if the HR director was just stupid? What if he was a very literal person? You don't know. You can't know, because it isn't part of the problem as worded, assuming there isn't some other part of the problem I haven't seen or context in what is being taught in the class to the contrary. At BEST, you could argue that you can't know if the HR director lied or not because you don't know his intentions when giving the answer. However, considering that the problem is not about psychology, but instead about discrete mathematics, intention doesn't factor into it!
We've come at this problem several different ways now, and every way you look at it, he did not lie. You've seem to have ignored all of my counter examples to your theory in which I laid out similar statements to show that lies were not involved. On top of that you are arguing outside of the realm of logic by throwing intention into it, similar to the previous attempt to define a third state in binary logic. If the teacher, plus two other individuals and the accumulated knowledge in the field can't convince you, I have no idea why I thought I could. I give up. Good luck.
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Date: 2003-09-02 10:32 pm (UTC)We've come at this problem several different ways now, and every way you look at it, he did not lie. You've seem to have ignored all of my counter examples to your theory in which I laid out similar statements to show that lies were not involved. On top of that you are arguing outside of the realm of logic by throwing intention into it, similar to the previous attempt to define a third state in binary logic. If the teacher, plus two other individuals and the accumulated knowledge in the field can't convince you, I have no idea why I thought I could. I give up. Good luck.