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Dr. Mortimer J. Adler's 

Six Great Ideas

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The Liar and the Skeptic

It is possible to be either a liar or a skeptic, but not both.

Of course, it is also possible, and quite preferable, to be

neither.

The person who maintains that he knows nothing because

nothing is knowable, or who declares that no statement can be

either true or false, interdicts himself from telling lies. His ex-

treme skepticism removes him from the ordinary world in

which most of us live and in which, according to him, we live

under the illusion that we can discriminate between statements

that are true and statements that are false.

Illusion or not, the liar at least thinks that he knows the dif-

ference between what is true and what is false when he delib-

erately deceives someone about a matter of fact. If he were in

total ignorance of the fact in question, or in grave doubt about

it, he could not tell a lie.

Consider the dishonest jeweler who persuades his customer

to purchase a ring that he claims is set with a diamond of high

quality, aware that what he is offering is nothing but a rela-

tively worthless imitation of the genuine article. He has told a

deliberate lie, which he simply could not do if, like the skep-

tic, he were to think that the statement he made—"The stone

in this ring is a diamond"—could be neither true nor false,

because nothing is either true or false.

However, there is one lie that the skeptic can tell. Sincere in

his adherence to skepticism, he can still deceive someone else

by pretending not to be a skeptic. Instead of honestly con-

fessing his skepticism, he can verbally declare the very oppo-

site, saying that he thinks some statements are true and others

false when he really thinks no such thing at all.

This pinpoints for us the essence of lying. It consists in put-

ting into words the very opposite of what one really thinks—

the opposite of one's own state of mind. If your landlord thinks

that rents are not going up and tells you in so many words that

they are, he has lied to you. The lie must, of course, be inten-

tional and with a deliberate purpose to deceive for the sake of

gaining some advantage, regardless of the injury that may re-

sult to the person who is deceived.

The condemnation of lying as morally wrong or unjust pre-

supposes that injury results from the deception. What we call a

"white lie" and usually condone rather than condemn consists

in a harmless deception or one that even may work to the ben-

efit of the person deceived. But whether the false statement

turns out to be injurious or beneficial, it remains a false state-

ment because what its words say do not correspond to what the

person who has made the statement actually thinks.

the definition of 'truth' has to do with a one-to-one correspondence

The truth of verbally expressed statements thus consists in

their correspondence or agreement with the state of mind of the

person making them or, if you will, with the statements he or

she makes in the privacy of his or her own mind. A verbally

expressed statement is false if the opposite relation obtains be-

tween it and what the person who makes it thinks, or says to

himself—if the two do not agree or correspond, as is the case if

I tell you that I have a toothache when I do not.

To speak falsely, it has been pointed out, consists in willfully

misplacing one's ontological predicates. That is a highfalutin

way of saying that to speak falsely consists in putting "is"

where one should put "is not," or "is not" where one should

put "is." The dishonest jeweler asserted, "This is a diamond,"

when he should have said, "This is not a diamond," because he

was aware that it was not what he asserted it to be.

When we characterize a person as a liar, implying thereby a

condemnation of his or her moral character, we usually impute

to that person a habitual disposition or inclination to speak

falsely whenever some profit can be gained from the deception.

We are put on guard to beware of what that person says. It

is more likely than not to be false and result in an injury to

someone.

Without being chronic or habitual liars, who among us

would not confess to having told some lies, white or otherwise?

By that confession, we separate ourselves from the extreme

skeptic who finds it impossible to tell lies, except, perhaps, the

one lie that attempts to conceal his skeptical state of mind.

Unlike the extreme skeptic, we do not refuse to attribute truth

to certain statements and falsity to others, sometimes with more

assurance, sometimes with less. The statements we regard as

true are those that not only honestly express what we think to

be the case, but those that in our judgment also assert what is

in fact the case.

Here, too, there is a relationship of agreement or correspond-

dence, but now that relation obtains between what a person

thinks, believes, opines, or says to himself and what actually

exists or does not exist in reality. When I assert that that which

is, is, or that that which is not, is not, my assertion is true.

When I assert that that which is, is not, or that that which is

not, is, my assertion is false.

Just as the truth of speech consists in the agreement or cor-

respondence between what one says to another and what one

thinks or says to oneself, so the truth of thought consists in the

agreement or correspondence between what one thinks, be-

lieves, or opines and what actually exists or does not exist in

the reality that is independent of our minds and of our thinking

one thing or another.

strangely, it's rather easy to define 'truth' but not so easy to say what is true in a particular case 

This definition of truth answers the question, "What is

truth?" but about any particular opinion or belief that we may

harbor in our minds, it does not answer the question, "Is it

true?" That is a much harder question to answer, even for those

who accept the definition of truth as consisting in an agreement

or correspondence between the mind and reality. For the ex-

treme skeptic who rejects that definition on the ground that it

erroneously presupposes a state of reality with which a state of

mind can agree or disagree, that second question is not merely

harder than the first, but unanswerable.

to use the word 'erroneously' implies some hidden standard of right and wrong 

The definition of truth involves an erroneous presupposition,

the skeptic charges. Does not his use of the word "erroneously"

trip him up? Has he not contradicted himself by saying, on the

one hand, that nothing is either true or false and yet saying, on

the other hand, that the presupposition involved in the define-

tion of truth is an erroneous presupposition or, in other words,

false?

'there are no absolutes' - except for the absolute statement asserting as such 

We are verging here on an age-old reply to the extreme skep-

tic that dismisses him as refuting himself. One cannot say that

no statements are true or false, or that there is no such thing as

truth in the sense defined, without contradicting oneself. If the

statement that expresses the skeptic's view about truth is one

that he himself regards as true, then at least one statement is

true. If it is false, then it is quite possible for many other state-

ments to be either true or false. If the statement that expresses

the skeptic's view is neither true nor false, then why should we

pay any attention to what he says?

Either he has contradicted himself or he has impelled us to

discontinue any further conversation with him on the grounds

that it can lead nowhere. There is no point in talking to some-

one who is willing to answer any question by saying both yes

and no at the same time.

Since the extreme skeptic does not acknowledge the restraint

imposed by the rule of reason that we ought not to contradict

ourselves if we can avoid doing so, our refutation of him by

appealing to that rule does not silence him. He has no objection

to being unreasonable. We may have refuted him to our own

satisfaction, but that does not carry with it an acknowledgment

by him that he has been refuted and should abandon his skep-

ticism. The only consequence that follows from our regarding

his view as self-contradictory and therefore self-refuting is the

judgment we may be forced to make that there is no point in

carrying on the conversation with him any further.

The commonsense view is the one that all of us embrace

when we reject the self-contradictory and self-refuting position

of the extreme skeptic as being not only unreasonable, but also

impracticable. There is hardly an aspect of our daily lives that

would be the same if we were to embrace instead of rejecting

the position of the extreme skeptic.

houses and bridges made of cardboard

Editor's note: Concerning the skeptics' inane proposition that there are no standards, in another writing Adler said this:

Dr. Mortimer Adler, Syntopicon essay, Truth: "But the ancient controversy in which Socrates engages with the sophists of his day, who were willing to regard as true whatever anyone wished to think, seems to differ not at all from Freud's quarrel with those whom he calls intellectual nihilists. They are the persons who say there is no such thing as truth or that it is only the product of our own needs and desires. They make it 'absolutely immaterial,' Freud writes, 'what views we accept. All of them are equally true and false. And no one has a right to accuse anyone else of error.' ... If all opinions are equally true or false, then why, Aristotle asks, does not the denier of truth walk 'into a well or over a precipice' instead of avoiding such things. 'If it were really a matter of indifference what we believed,' Freud similarly argues, 'then we might just as well build our bridges of cardboard as of stone, or inject a tenth of a gramme of morphia into a patient instead of a hundredth, or take tear-gas as a narcotic instead of ether. But,' he adds, 'the intellectual anarchists themselves would strongly repudiate such practical applications of their theory.'"

We are firmly committed to the view that truth and falsity are ascertainable by us and that, with varying degrees of assurance, we can somehow discriminate between what is true and what is false. Almost everything we do or rely upon is grounded in that commitment.

One illustration of this should suffice. We accept trial by jury

before a judicial tribunal as a way of deciding disputed ques-

tions of fact. Was the prisoner at the bar seen running away

from the scene of the crime? Was the last will and testament of

the deceased signed by him while in a sound state of body and

mind? Witnesses are called to give testimony in answer to such

questions; and, in the direct and cross-examination of the wit-

nesses, the attempt is made by counsel either to enhance their

credibility in the eyes of the jury or to diminish it.

When all the evidence is in and the jury has completed its

deliberations, the verdict they render asserts the truth of a

statement of fact, either beyond a reasonable doubt in a crimi-

nal prosecution or by a preponderance of the evidence in a civil

litigation.

That's what the word "verdict" means—the assertion of a

truth. The verdict that the prisoner at the bar is not guilty as

charged may spring from the jury's low estimate of the credi-

bility of the witness who testified that he saw the person

charged with murder running away from the scene of the crime.

The verdict may also have been determined by more credible

testimony that he was somewhere else on that occasion. It never

occurs to the jury to doubt that one of the two alternatives must

be the case in fact: either the person charged with the crime

did have the opportunity to commit it or he did not have the

opportunity to commit it.

The presupposition called erroneous by the skeptic will not

be regarded as such by persons holding a commonsense view

of the world in which we live. Common sense would not hesi-

tate for a moment to assert that at a given time a particular thing

either exists or does not exist, that a certain event either oc-

curred or did not occur, that something being considered either

does or does not have a certain characteristic or attribute. Far

from being an outrageous, not to say erroneous, assumption

about the reality to which our beliefs or opinions may or may

not correspond, this view of reality seems undeniable to com-

mon sense.

By the commonsense view with regard to truth, I mean sim-

ply the nonskeptical view that understands what truth consists

in—what it means for a statement to be true rather than false.

In addition, the commonsense view does not doubt that some

statements are true and others false and that there are ways of

finding out which is which.

Without being explicitly aware of it, the jury embraces this

commonsense view in its unquestioning acceptance of the fact

that the person charged with murder either did or did not have

the opportunity to commit the crime. That being so, then one

or the other of these alternatives must be true and the other

false. The grounds of the jury's verdict are thus seen to consist,

first, in their accepting the presupposition involved in the def-

inition of truth, which the skeptic rejects as erroneous; and,

second, in their confidence that by weighing the evidence they

can ascertain which of two opposite statements is true and

which is false.

In the first instance, they implicitly acknowledge the correct-

ness of the definition of truth as an agreement or correspond-

dence between the mind and reality, which means that they

affirm the existence of a reality that is independent of the mind

and is what it is regardless of what we may think about it.

In the second instance, they implicitly acknowledge that, in

addition to knowing what truth consists in, they can also use

their minds to discover whether a given statement is true or

false.

Human beings have been charged with perjury and con-

victed of it. They have been found guilty of falsification when

they are under oath to speak the truth, the whole truth, and

nothing but the truth. If the skeptic's denials were sound, the

oath every witness is required to take, and the threat of a pros-

ecution for perjury if he or she fails to live up to it, would be a

scandalous travesty.

Judicial procedure and trial by jury afford but one example

out of many, all of which tend to show how in the practical

affairs of daily life the commonsense view prevails — in busi-

ness and commerce, in the practice of the professions, in the

rearing of children and in other aspects of family life, in the

consideration of the claims made by candidates for public of-

fice, or the claims made by advertisers, in buying and sell-

ing and in economic transactions of every sort, and in all our

dealings with our fellow human beings.

In our further consideration of truth in the chapters to follow,

we shall be concerned with the failure to speak the truth that

arises from ignorance or error rather than from deliberate pre-

varication. One does not have the truth in one's mind and so,

with no intention to deceive, one fails to speak it when one

expresses one's mind in verbal utterance.

There is a clear difference between the judgment that what a

man says is false and the judgment that he is telling a lie. His

statement may be false without his necessarily being a liar. Try

as he will to speak truthfully by saying precisely what he

thinks, he may be mistaken in what he says through error or

ignorance.

Editor's note: As they used to say in law school, "The judge may be in error, but never in doubt." 

The person we ask for directions may honestly but erro-

neously think that a certain road is the shortest route to the

destination we wish to reach. When he tells us which road to

take, what he says is false, but not a lie. However, if he does in

fact know another road to be shorter and withholds that infor-

mation from us, then his statement is not only false, but also

a lie...

Pyrrho [circa. 300 BC], a philosopher of antiquity, has been regarded as the outstanding exponent of extreme skepticism, and so in the history of Western thought extreme skepticism bears the label "Pyrrhonism."

wandering into a fire

Editor's note: It is somewhere stated that the disciples of Pyrrho would attend to him closely lest he wander into a fire, so extreme was his refusal to admit to any standards. We presume that he would build a house out of cardboard.

Wikipedia: A summary of Pyrrho's philosophy was preserved by Eusebius, quoting Aristocles, quoting Timon, in what is known as the "Aristocles passage." There are conflicting interpretations of the ideas presented in this passage, each of which leads to a different conclusion as to what Pyrrho meant:

'The things themselves are equally indifferent, and unstable, and indeterminate, and therefore neither our senses nor our opinions are either true or false. For this reason then we must not trust them, but be without opinions, and without bias, and without wavering, saying of every single thing that it no more is than is not, or both is and is not, or neither is nor is not.^"

In modern times, the philosopher David Hume

attempted to draw a line between Pyrrhonism—the extreme

skepticism that sensible persons are compelled to reject—and

that moderate form of skepticism that wisdom recommends.

"The great subverter of Pyrrhonism or the excessive principles

of skepticism” Hume declared, "is action, and employment,

and the occupations of common life.”

Editor's note: In other words, if you want to live in the real world, Pyrrhonism will be your undoing.

These principles may flourish and triumph in the schools [where academics can hide in ivory towers]; where it is, indeed, difficult, if not impossible, to refute them. But as soon as they leave the shade [for the real world], and by the presence of the real objects, which actuate our passions and sentiments, are put in opposition to the more powerful principles of our nature, they vanish like smoke, and leave the most determined sceptic in the same condition as other mortals.

Hence, Hume concluded,

A Pyrrhonian cannot expect that his philosophy will have any con-

stant influence on the mind: or if it had, that its influence would be

beneficial to society. On the contrary, he must acknowledge, if he will acknowledge anything, that all human life must perish, were his principles universally and steadily to prevail. All discourse, all action

would immediately cease; and men remain in a total lethargy, till the

necessities of nature, unsatisfied, put an end to their miserable existence.