If he lied when he swore the oath, is he still a doctor?
BTW, I like this game: 'endlessly avoid making a point'. The winner is the person who gets the other one to end up questioning something that is required for a shared reality -- thus effectively admitting they might as well be arguing with themselves.
Sure. @sokoloff was offering a rhetorical question showing the absurdity of calling a statement in the past a “lie” just because the contents of that statement didn’t come to pass.
A falsehood isn’t even a lie if it is spoken when it is actually false unless the speaker knows it is false. Arguably less so when at the time the truth of the statement couldn’t actually be known. Later it was found/determined/decided that @sokoloff would not be an astronaut. So the statement was shown to be false. But that doesn’t retroactively cause the statement to be a lie.
Notably pointing out that such statements aren’t lies is not a defense of the subsequent behavior that caused the original statement to become a falsehood.
Your response was something of a non sequitur focusing instead on whether a doctor is “allowed” to do that, but whether a doctor is allowed to do that would have no bearing on whether he lied in the past. I got the sense that you were implying that this behavior was bad behavior but to use your example, no defense was made of the doctor breaking his oath.
My question used your example of the doctor to reframe @sokoloff’s original rhetorical question. Is a doctor who breaks his oath an oath breaker? Yes. Did he lie when he took the oath? Only if he always intended to break the oath. If you believe he didn’t intend to break the oath at the time he swore it, you have to conclude that he didn’t lie, even if breaking his oath is otherwise undesirable behavior.
So your point is that someone must define the difference between a person 'telling a lie', 'giving their word', or 'swearing an oath' in order to make the argument that that person went back on their original principles, because if they say 'lie' instead then we will pick apart that instead of relying on their intended meaning.
And my point is that if we dissect the meaning of the language long enough we end up questioning our own existence.
My point is that these differences are already defined and common knowledge.
This isn't on the order of splitting hairs when trying to define something nebulous like consciousness. There would be quite a difference between @sokoloff saying, "I am going to be an astronaut" as a child, and if he were to say "I am an astronaut" now.
What is the 'intended meaning'? The poster made a claim that is false. There is no ambiguity about what was said regardless of presumed intent. Any concerns about questioning our own existence seem extremely premature at best.
BTW, I like this game: 'endlessly avoid making a point'. The winner is the person who gets the other one to end up questioning something that is required for a shared reality -- thus effectively admitting they might as well be arguing with themselves.