The Thomist 63 (1999): 439-53

LYING AND SPEAKING YOUR INTERLOCUTOR'S LANGUAGE⁽¹⁾

Alexander R. Pruss
University of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Introduction

GIVEN ITS CONSTANT preoccupation with the Church's stance on sexual issues, it is not surprising that the media have missed a controversy over lying in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. In the first English version [CCC1], the Catechism stated:

Lying is the most direct offense against the truth. To lie is to speak or act against the truth in order to lead into error someone who has the right to know the truth. (¶2483)

an intentionally untruthful declaration to another man . . . always harms another; if not some other human being, then it nevertheless does harm to humanity in general, inasmuch as it vitiates the very source of right [Rechtsquelle]. (426)

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The very source of right is rationality, and an untruthful declara-tion is directed against rationality.

But one can also make another criticism of the CCC1's principle against lying. To say that it is wrong "to speak or act against the truth in order to lead into error someone who has the right to know the truth" is a merely analytic truth, a tautology, since its validity follows from the very meaning of the word "right" in "right to know the truth." Evidently one may not act against someone's right--this is what the word "right" means. Thus the CCC1 formulation, while not false, is trivial. Moreover, it does not accurately reflect the full strength of the traditional prohibitions against lying in the Catholic Church. Perhaps for these as well as other reasons, the recently released second English version of the Catechism [CCC2] states instead:

Lying is the most direct offense against the truth. To lie is to speak or act against the truth in order to lead someone into error. (¶2483)

This formulation is free of our and Kant's criticisms of the CCC1 principle, but now it becomes open to criticisms to the effect that it is too strong. After all, if one is hiding Jews in one's basement and the Gestapo asks whether one has Jews in one's basement, then one might think that to fail to deny the presence of Jews in one's basement is wrong. Obviously, remaining silent is not an option since in this case clearly silentium affirmatio est.⁽²⁾ Nor is any kind of equivocation (equivocation, an assertion of a true claim that one expects to be misunderstood by the interlocutor, might be compatible with CCC2's ¶2483, though it is not clear if it agrees with Kant's views) a reasonable option (one might well imagine that the Gestapo insists on an unambiguous yes or no answer). Kant appears committed to biting the bullet and saying that there are Jews in his basement. We will argue that in this case, and perhaps in a few similar cases, both on Kantian grounds and on the grounds of the CCC2, it is acceptable to say to the Gestapo, in a clear voice, "No, there are no Jews in my house." Indeed, we will argue the further claim that to say, "Yes, there are

Jews in my house," would be to lie. We will use this particular example throughout the argument.

Before we come to the solution, we shall have to examine an important issue of language. Our general approach will be inspired by the method of examples and counterexamples so popular in analytic philosophy, a method ultimately tracing itself back to the Socratic method of what Aristotle calls "induction [epagoge]" and which proceeds by proferring a number of cases, allowing the listener to grasp the general principle.

I. Speaking Your Interlocutor's Language

First, consider a rather straightforward case.

Dietrich, a German, is visiting John, an American, in New York. They are sitting in a café. Dietrich knows very well that John is expecting to be spoken to in English, and Dietrich also knows English quite well. He puts an attractive unlabelled bottle of poison on the table before John, and says: "Gift." John takes the bottle with gratitude, and later at home drinks it and dies. What John did not know is that Dietrich uttered the word "Gift" in German, in which it means "poison."

Dietrich has not only murdered John, he has lied to him. That "Gift" means poison in German in no way excuses Dietrich from the charge of lying, because Dietrich knew that John would inter-pret the utterance as an English word rather than as a German word. To speak one language deceitfully when your interlocutor is expecting another is to lie, because a basic principle of human language is that one speak in ways that one expects the inter-locutor to understand.

In fact, one could say that all human discourse happens in a single superlanguage, which has a grammar that subsumes the grammars of all the individual languages. The superlanguage's grammar and syntax in particular governs discourse in multiple languages, and describes the normative universal human practice of linguistic communication. It is a grammatico-syntactic feature of the superlanguage that in the context of the Dietrich-John story the meaning of the utterance "Gift" is the English one, because the context determines that syntactically (in super-language syntax) the word is to be understood in English. Thus,

Dietrich has lied in the superlanguage. He has made the utterance "Gift" in a context in which it does not truly apply.

Now consider a case that is a little more complicated. This case trades on the interesting linguistic fact that the Polish word zapomnie (to forget) has the exact opposite meaning to its Russian cognate zapomnyet' (to commit to memory).⁽³⁾

Natasha, a Russian, is visiting her friend Artur, a Pole, in Warsaw. Natasha knows Polish pretty well. On the last day of the visit, she asks Artur to give her best regards to some Poles that she knows but whom she did not have time to meet. She tells Artur their names. However, Artur forgets all the names. An hour later, she asks Artur in Polish: "Do you know the names of all the people to whom I asked you to give my kind regards?" Artur does not wish to admit that he has forgotten the names, and he knows that not remembering the names is a good excuse for him not to have to talk to certain people to whom he does not wish to talk. He answers, also in Polish: "Zapomniaem wszystkie nazwiska." This is perfectly good Polish, and it means, "I have forgotten all the names." Natasha knows, and Artur knows that she knows, that this is spoken in Polish. However, Artur also knows that Natasha will misunderstand "Zapomniaem" to mean "I have committed to memory," because the Russian cognate of the Polish verb used here means "To commit to memory." Thus, Artur knows that Natasha will understand him to have said, "I have committed all the names to memory."

Here, Artur has lied to Natasha. Yet unlike Dietrich's interlocu-tor, Natasha knows in what language she is being spoken to. We propose the following analysis of why we can say that Artur has lied to Natasha. In addition to the broader dividing lines between individual languages such as Polish, Russian, German, and Eng-lish, there are finer dialectal divisions within the individual lan-guages. But even in addition to these dialectal divisions, there are cases where small groups might adopt a variant linguistic form. Thus, one can imagine a pair of English speakers who have decided, for fun, that whenever they are speaking to each other, they will interchange the meanings of the words "cat" and "dog." These two people are speaking a somewhat different language from standard English. Now, what Natasha is speaking is in fact not Polish, but what we might call "Ruspolish," namely, that dia-

lect of Polish which is spoken by a Russian who has not studied the dangers of Polish-Russian falsely friendly cognates. Given that Artur knows that Natasha expects to be spoken to in Ruspolish (though she herself would call it "Polish"), Artur's utterance is a lie. Superlanguage rules require that you speak in a language that your interlocutor will understand. In the superlanguage context, given Artur's knowledge of Natasha's expectation to be spoken to in Ruspolish, Artur's statement, "Zapomniaem wszystkie nazwiska," must be taken to be a Ruspolish statement, meaning, "I have committed all the names to memory," and hence is false and, indeed, a lie.

Thus, the present case is in fact exactly the same as the Dietrich-John case, with the exception that Natasha does not know that her language (Ruspolish) deviates from standard Polish. But this exception does not make Artur's deceit any less of a lie.

The strong anti-lying principle is that making a false assertion in order to lead someone into error is wrong. The question then arises in the above cases of how utterances are to be understood as assertions; the right answer appears to be that assertions in multilinguistic contexts are governed by certain partly contextual superlanguage rules. The anti-lying principle in multilinguistic contexts then says that you may not utter an assertion which you believe to be false when understood in your interlocutor's language (i.e., the language in which your interlocutor will take your assertion to have been made), with intent to deceive.⁽⁴⁾ One must speak one's interlocutor's language.

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II. The Gestapo and the Jews

Helga is hiding Jews in her basement. The Gestapo comes to her door. The Gestapo officer knows that Helga is an upright and very honest person, and Helga knows that he knows this. The officer asks, "Are there any Jews in your house?" Helga knows that the officer knows that she knows that if she answers in the affirmative or is ambiguous or remains silent then her house will be searched and all Jews found therein will be killed. Helga thinks for a moment. Then she looks the officer straight in the eye and answers clearly, distinctly and with an air of sincerity: "No, there are no Jews in my house."

At first sight, Helga has lied, transgressing against the CCC2 anti-lying principle (though not against the CCC1 principle, since presumably the Gestapo officer has no right to know whether there are Jews in Helga's house), and against Kant's anti-lying principle.

However, let us analyze carefully what Helga has asserted. She said that in her house "there are no Jews." Let us assume that it is clear to all that her basement is a part of the house. The grammar of Helga's utterance is clear. What about the meanings of the words? In ordinary language there is no problem with words like "no," "are," "in," "my," and "house". But there is one word that is rather fluid: "Jews." It has religious, ethnic, and perhaps other meanings. What are "Jews"? Let us assume for the sake of the argument that all of the Jews in Helga's are both fully ethnically Jewish (recognizing that ethnic designations are inherently ambiguous, we need to mean by this something like that they consider themselves ethnically Jewish and are considered as such by just about everybody else) and fully religiously Jewish. They are definitely Jews by our standards.

So it seems that Helga has lied, that she said there were no Jews in her basement while there were. But actually, Helga did not say that there were no Jews in her basement. She said that there were no "Jews" in her basement.⁽⁵⁾ To understand this

apparent paradox, let us recall the multilinguistic form of the principle prohibiting lying formulated in the previous section. To lie is to deceitfully utter something which in one's interlocutor's language is false. One's utterances are to be interpreted in that language which one expects one's interlocutor to understand them as being made in. But language is not defined by dictionaries (as already seen in the case of Artur and Natasha), but by usage. The crucial question to ask now is this: What does the utterance "Jew" mean to the Gestapo officer? Assuming that Helga knows the Gestapo officer's language, she has lied if and only if within her house there are entities in the extension of the term "Jew" as understood in the Gestapo officer's language. Moreover, if there are no such entities in her house, then it would have been a lie for Helga to say, "Yes, there are Jews in my house"--it would have been exactly the kind of lie that Artur uttered to Natasha.

But now the way to a possible solution is clear. If language is defined by usage, then the primary meaning of the word "Jew" must be taken from the linguistic utterances of the community to which the Gestapo officer belongs--utterances such as the follow-ing one from Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf:

When thus for the first time I recognized the Jew as the cold-hearted, shameless, and calculating director of this revolting vice traffic in the scum of the big city, a cold shudder ran down my back.

The language of the Gestapo officer's social milieu was defined by works such as Mein Kampf and by Goebbels's propaganda. For the Gestapo officer, the primary meaning of the word "Jew" was something like "a sub-human, cold-hearted, shameless, calculating trafficker in vices." Thus, when the Gestapo officer asked Helga, "Are there any Jews in your house?" what his question really meant in ordinary English was: "Are there any sub-human, cold-hearted, shameless, calculating traffickers in vices in your house?"

But of course Helga, as an upstanding citizen, would not have any such sub-humans in her house, and so after a moment of thought during which she translated from Gestapo-speak to her own language and back, she answered with something that when

translated from Gestapo-speak to ordinary English would mean: "No, there are no sub-human, cold-hearted, shameless, calculating traffickers in vices in my house." She could say this with perfect sincerity while looking the Gestapo officer in the eyes.

In fact, had Helga said, "Yes, there are Jews in my house," this would have meant, in the Gestapo-speak in which she was speaking to the Gestapo officer in accordance to the principle of speaking your interlocutor's language: "Yes, there are some sub-human, cold-hearted, shameless, calculating traffickers in vices in my house." This not only would have condemned the Jews in her house to death, but would also have slandered her house's occupants.

Thus, by uttering the words, "No, there are no Jews in my house," Helga spoke truly, and by uttering the words, "Yes, there are Jews in my house," she would have been lying, even though there were Jews in her house. The key point is that "Jews" in Gestapo-speak does not signify Jews, but a semi-mythical entity.⁽⁶⁾

It may be objected that our defense of Helga's action neglects a Kripkean account of a distinction between essential and non-essential properties. The essential properties of a Jew, from the Nazi point of view, would have been some genetic qualities. Let us leave aside the fact that these genetic qualities cannot be fully defined, and involve an inescapable confusion between ethnic and religious senses of Jewishness.⁽⁷⁾ Call the conjunction of the essen-tial genetic properties G. In addition to G, the Nazi would, according to this objection, believe there are some nonessential properties, such as being a sub-human, cold-hearted, shameless, calculating trafficker in vice (for conciseness call this composite property S) that are coextensive with the class of all Jews. Then, when the Nazi asks Helga, "Are there any Jews in your house?" the objection to be made is that what he is asking Helga is, "Are there any entities satisfying G in your house?" It is true that the

Nazi believes that G is coextensive with S, but nonetheless, had Helga answered, "No, there are no Jews in my house," the Nazi would have understood this to mean, "No, there are no entities satisfying G in my house," which would be a lie, even though, "No, there are no entities satisfying S in my house," would be true.

Even if we grant the Aristotelian-Kripkean distinction at the heart of this objection, the objection neglects the fact that when analyzing the meaning of an actual utterance it is not an essential vs. nonessential property distinction that matters, but rather a salient vs. nonsalient property distinction which we must take account of. Consider the following story:

Margaret lands on the famous Twin Earth that analytic philosophers like to imagine. Suppose also that XYZ (a liquid that has a different composition--and hence difference essence--from H₂O despite having the same gross qualities) has exactly the same qualitative properties with regard to the preservation of Margaret's life as H₂O does. Unfortunately, Margaret's water supply has run out a few days ago, and Margaret is dying of thirst. After Margaret lands on Twin Earth, not knowing that on this planet there is no H₂O but only XYZ, she gets thirsty and asks a native standing by a body of XYZ, "Is this water?" Now, the native, let us suppose, knows all about the H₂O vs. XYZ distinction, and he knows all about the fact that XYZ has the same effects on Margaret's body as H₂O. He also knows that Margaret is not much of a scientist (so she won't understand that XYZ is harmless) and that unless she is told that there is water there, she will very soon die of thirst. He also knows that Margaret doesn't know that what is present on Twin Earth is XYZ and not H₂O. He answers, "Yes, this is water."

Did the native lie? If it is the essential vs. nonessential property distinction that is important to understanding language, then he did, since he knew that Margaret would understand "Yes, this is water," in Earth-English rather than in Twin-Earth-English, and what is present on Twin Earth does not have the essential proper-ties of water (i.e., of H₂O). However, Margaret really does not care about the chemical composition of the liquid in front of her. What she cares about is that it will satisfy her thirst and save her life. The salient property of water in her discursive context is not the essential property that water is H₂O (assuming that Kripke's account is correct) but rather the nonessential property that it

satisfies thirst and is beneficial to her. Were Margaret to have full information and the capacity to understand it, she would not consider it relevant whether what is present before her is XYZ or H₂O. (In fact, she then might not ask whether it is water, but merely whether it has the thirst-satisfying properties of water.) The chemical composition is not salient for the analysis of the meaning of her question and of the answer as understood by her. The native spoke truly.

Just as the native spoke truly, so did Helga. For the salient property in the context of the Gestapo seeing Jews for slaughter is not G, but S. It is not because of Jews possessing G that the Gestapo wishes to kill Jews, but because of the Jews allegedly possessing S. It is S that is the salient property in the context of the Gestapo search, just as from Margaret's point of view it is the life-preservingness that is the salient property. In fact, the Gestapo officer might not even understand G very well. He might not be a geneticist. The reason for seeking Jews to kill was not the true⁽⁸⁾ belief that they possess G, but the false belief that they possess S (or, at most, the false belief that G entails S).

Another science-fictional example might help to clarify the point in a different way.

In the year 2600, it becomes possible to enumerate the essential properties of an individual human being and this has been done for all people by a central authority. Morton is sought for a brutal murder of which he was convicted, but after which conviction he escaped. He is so dangerous that he must be killed on sight. Now, Donna's husband Frank looks exactly like Morton. What is worse, the police computer has erroneously substituted Frank's data for Morton's. The policeman comes to Donna's door, reads to her the list of what he thinks are Morton's essential properties (in suitably abbreviated form, one presumes, and perhaps reduced to a single number), but which in fact are Frank's properties, and asks, "Is the person with these properties in the house?" Donna knows the policeman won't listen to any explanations, because Morton is too dangerous and too well-armed for the police to have patience for anything but a quick answer. Donna knows that she has just been handed a list of Frank's properties, and she knows that if she answers affirmatively or hesitates, the police will come in, see Frank, and shoot him. She answers: "No."

Let F be the list of properties of Frank that the policeman has read to Donna. When the policeman asks, "Is the person satisfying F in the house?" it is still not F-ness that is salient, even though F-ness is an essence, but rather the unstated property of being a brutal murderer. When the policeman asks, "Is the person satisfying F in the house?" he does not really care about F-ness, any more than Margaret cares whether what is on the planet is H₂O or XYZ (indeed, on this account, Margaret could have just as well asked, "Is this H₂O?" and if the native knew the motivations behind the question, then he could answer, "Yes, this is H₂O"). For the policeman the salient meaning of "person satisfying F" is a compound noun meaning "brutal murderer named Morton." This person is not present in Donna's house, and she is truthful in answering in the negative.

In the same way, the salient meaning of "Jew" from the Gestapo's point of view in the context of capturing "Jews" for slaughter is not G but S. Since nobody in Helga's household satisfies S, she is right to deny there are any "Jews" in her house.

Three more objections may occur rather immediately. First, supposing that it is true, as the above account alleges, that the Gestapo is seeking instances of S and not instances of G, are we able to condemn the Gestapo for being racist murderers? After all, a person seeking to destroy instances of S, that is, seeking to eliminate sub-human, cold-hearted, shameless, calculating traffick-ers in vices, cannot be said to be a racist murderer. That is in part correct. And indeed, one might argue that out of charity Helga should assume the Gestapo officer is seeking instances of S rather than instances of G, since one should assume the best about people. However, it is also the case that the Gestapo officer might well be culpably guilty of believing that instances of G are in-stances of S. It may be hatred that is inspiring him to paint G's as S's, or to accept the propaganda that paints them thus. He may be culpably guilty in not questioning the propaganda. He may be culpably guilty in self-inducing in himself the belief that G's are S's. After all, we can reasonably say that he should know that at least most G's are not S's, and so his error is probably a culpable one, and we can have at least sufficient certainty of the culpability of his error that a human court might be able to convict him of

his crimes, unless he were to bring in sufficient evidence to show that the propaganda brainwashed him in such a way as to make him invincibly ignorant of most G's not being S's. In the desire to condemn Nazism, one has to be careful to understand that some individual Nazis might not have been culpable.

There is a second objection that is more worrying. Suppose that we have a Gestapo officer who does not believe that G's are S's. In fact, he knows very well that Jews are ordinary people, no more and no less prone to vice than others. He does not believe any of the Nazi propaganda, and thinks that the slander of the Jews in Mein Kampf is just that--slander. However, out of a sheer malicious desire to cause pain to others, this officer decides to murder Jews. When he asks, "Are there any Jews in your house?" he really means "Are there any instances of G in your house?" Now, as the story is described, Helga can still answer, "No, there are no Jews in my house," because she will naturally assume that a Gestapo officer at her door is of the more usual propaganda-believing kind, rather than of the clear-thinking but demonically malicious kind that is now under consideration. Indeed, the principle of charity would lead her to assume that the officer is of the first kind.

But what if Helga knows this Gestapo officer, and knows the above facts about him? One could deny this possibility by saying that no amount of evidence could possibly make it completely certain that a person is the demonically malicious kind of Gestapo officer described in the previous paragraph, and that the principle of charity would still force one to assume (except in circumstances where prudence requires that one go by the mere no reasonable doubt standard of the courts, this not being such a circumstance) that the officer is the propaganda-believer. Alternately, it could be said that malice necessarily distorts one's point of view. Thus, the Gestapo officer through his malice necessarily comes to believe that G's have false properties (such as hatefulness or fittingness for torture), and it is under the description of these false properties that he seeks "Jews," so that in his linguistic practice, "Jew," despite his explicit avowals to the contrary, necessarily takes on a meaning charged with false properties. This second answer appears plausible. It is probable enough, we suggest, that in

practice Helga could act on it and say, "No, there are no Jews in my house," expecting that the Gestapo officer would take this to mean that there are no hateful persons or persons worthy of torture in the house (for cases of practical action, one only needs probabilities, not certainties). Note that this second reply also may work in other cases of a murderer (other than a Nazi) who hates a certain person and who comes to the door asking whether this person is within when in fact he is.

However, if neither of the two replies works, then one must admit that this is a case of lying, and that Helga has no choice but to remain silent, equivocate (if equivocation is acceptable when lying is not, which is very much open to question),⁽⁹⁾ or die in a physical attack on the Gestapo officer. To abstain from lying under these circumstances might strike some as an overvaluing of the value of truth, but there appears to be no escape from it, given either the CCC2 principle or Kant's condemnation of lying.

A third objection might be offered to the effect that our account of why it is acceptable for Helga to say, "No, there are no Jews here," fails to do justice to the actual motivations that any particular historical Helga might have had, and so although it excuses a theoretical Helga from guilt, the historical Helgas in such situations were all guilty by virtue of not having the correct motivations, since they did not think in terms of the "speak your interlocutor's language" principle. But in fact, quite possibly, something like the principle was in the back of the historical Helgas' minds. They might have reasoned, "The only reason this Gestapo officer wants to know whether there are Jews is to kill them. There's nobody in my house deserving of death." Or else they might have simply acted on a moral intuition⁽¹⁰⁾ that correctly states that in such cases one can say, "No, there are no Jews here."

Finally, one might try to formulate an alternate, perhaps preferable, account. One such account that respects the value of truth as found in the CCC2 principle and in Kantianism would be to say that we should maximize the truth-content of our interlocutor's minds. Now, saying, "Yes, there are Jews here," will have many false implications that the Gestapo officer will make. The Gestapo officer will, for example, come to accept the false proposition, "There are people worthy of death in the house," and maybe even the false normative proposition, "I ought to arrest some people in this house." Thus, while the statement implants one truth in the Gestapo officer's mind, it leads him to believe many falsehoods. However, a principle of maximizing the truth-content of our interlocutor's minds leads to a breakdown of the structures of trust in society (and thus is not generalizable in accordance with the categorical imperative). After all, religious persons following such a principle might manufacture false miracles, on the ground that a person's belief in the small falsehood of some miracle having taken place is far less significant and outweighed by the value of the true beliefs in the rest of the religion. It is clear that if the truth-content maximizing principle were generally followed, then people would trust each other less, and would become less able to come to true conclusions, and in fact the principle would be self-defeating when generalized.

Conclusion

It has been argued that the principle to speak your interlocutor's language together with a distinction between the properties salient and nonsalient in a given communicative con-text allows one to say that a person who, having Jews in her basement, answers to the Gestapo, "No, there are no Jews in my house," is saying the truth, and would be lying if she said, "Yes, there are Jews in my house."

The correct principle against lying, compatible with the CCC2 and with Kantianism, then should be read as stating:

(L) Never say what is false in your interlocutor's language (i.e., in the language you expect him to understand your statement within) with the intention of deceiving him.

Here, "language" must take into account the salient vs. nonsalient contextual distinction with regard to meaning. Such a distinction is generally necessary, since persons rarely have a full understanding of all the facts. If a man on the street asks me, "What time is it?" I, despite being a philosopher, do not need to correct his doubtless many incorrect understandings of the nature of time before telling him that the current time is 4:19 p.m. He may draw some false inferences from this. He might, for instance, contrary to relativity theory, conclude that there is an absolute "now" throughout space that is labeled "4:19 p.m." The philo-sophical facts about the nature of time are not salient in this situation, unless I know the man to be a philosopher interested in the present context not in the ordinary practical sense of "what time it is" but in the nature of time. Almost every time we are asked a question and give an answer, it is likely that our interlocutor misunderstands, in some small way, one or more properties pertaining to the terms in our answer; we must, in order to satisfy (L), take care to ensure that in the salient sense our reply is true, where salience is measured from the point of view of our interlocutor's language and his present circumstantial context.⁽¹¹⁾

1. I am most grateful to Abigail Tardiff for fascinating discussions on this topic. In particular, I am indebted to her for so aptly characterizing the basic idea from which this paper evolved as: "speaking [your interlocutor's] language." Without her contribution, the paper might have never been written.

2. Or at least, silentium has the same end result as affirmatio.

3. And, even more curiously, the Polish opposite to zapomnie, namely zapamita (to commit to memory), has as its Russian cognate the archaic/colloquial word zapamyatovat' which means "to forget."

4. The "with intent to deceive" qualification is, of course, intended to rule out cases like those of jokes mutually understood as such. Alternately, such jokes can be analyzed as not being assertions, and hence as not falling under the head of the anti-lying principle. Saint Thomas criticizes the jocose lie which "is not told to deceive, nor does it deceive by the way it is told" as being "of a nature to deceive" on account of "the very genus of the action" (STh II-II, q. 110, a. 3). This criticism, however, misses the mark if one can analyze apparently false sentences not intended to deceive as not being assertions. A proper understanding of language takes into account contextual and nonverbal factors, including whether the speaker and listener are taking a given utterance to be literally assertoric. To call jokes that are not intended to deceive and that do not deceive "lies" is as much a misunderstanding of language as to say that the Psalmist's quoting the fool's "There is no God" (Ps 10:4; 14:1) is a lie or to say that Dostoevskii was a liar when he penned the Brothers Karamazov because there never was such a person as Ivan Karamazov. Saint Thomas's mistake here is not so much a philosophical one as one of linguistic theory.

5. There is a crucial linguistic difference (mention versus use) between a quoted and an unquoted word. An unquoted (and nonitalicized) word is to be understood as meant in the language of the surrounding text. A quoted word can be understood in the language of the original communicative context. (In fact, in the above sentence what one would really like are not ordinary quotation marks but Robert Brandom's "scare quotes"; see his Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing and Discursive Commitment [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994], 545.)

6. We write semi-mythical, because there probably do exist cold-hearted, shameless, calculating traffickers in vices. Such traffickers in vices might not be sub-human, but at least one might find some who act sub-humanly. And of course, since every ethnic group has its bad apples, there are likely even some Jews (in an ethnic, not religious, sense) who are like that.

7. Many religious Jews might have been descendants of converts to Judaism in ages past, though the Nazis would still have counted them as Jews.

8. For simplicity we are assuming the Nazis' genetic criteria made sense. If they did not, then the whole Kripkean objection falls apart.

9. The principle of speaking your interlocutor's language does appear to rule out equivocation, though the matter is perhaps not completely certain, since the equivocation might be within one's interlocutor's language. The detailed examination of this question is outside the scope of the present paper.

10. And as Christians, we certainly do admit that such a moral intuition might have been implanted by an inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

11. Kantians, and maybe even some others, will also be pleased to note that (L) is fully generalizable and hence satisfies Kant's categorical imperative.