[cgriswald]

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.

[Eisenstein]

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.

[cgriswald]

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.

[Eisenstein]

I think the intent of the original comment 'they lied about doing no evil and we should dislike them for it and feel betrayed' is key here. Yes, technically 'lied' is not the correct term, but nitpicking it by using a completely different scenario (a child making a grandiose decision motivated by the nature of childhood) is going from 'wrong term' to 'fundamentally misunderstanding the nature of trust'. I think a better example than any of the ones brought forward would be a loan. Would you trust a child to pay back a loan or to be able to conceptualize the requirements of what it means to commit to doing so? If not why would that be a useful example of honesty in this context? Sure, the child would not be dishonest about the payment, but you wouldn't trust them with it.

The parent comment was making a statement about dishonesty in the sense that when an adult makes a commitment, we hold them to that unless we do not trust them, and those were people we thought we could trust. They have gone back on that and now we think they are deceitful because they betrayed our trust. Whether or not they believed it at the time they said it still makes them scumbugs for having changed their mind at a later date.

[cgriswald]

This is not a technicality or a nitpick. The scenario offered was different in order to make it easier to see the error, not to suggest both scenarios are somehow identical in every regard. Your doctor scenario also demonstrates the difference.

Regardless, suppose you did lend that child money and they didn't pay you back. Then suppose as young adults, they come back to you and ask to borrow money again. If they always intended to pay you back and have now matured (and maybe even ultimately did pay you back years late), you'd be far more likely to lend them money again than if you found out somehow that he never intended to pay you back the first time.

There is meaningful difference between "This person committed to something and ultimately didn't live up to that commitment," (or only lived up to it for a certain amount of time, etc.) and "This person lied when they said they were committing to something because ultimately they failed." In one case they changed their mind and perhaps knowingly went back on their word or were unable to live up to their word due to forces outside their control. In the second case abuse of trust was the entire plan. Both of these say different things about the person who violated our trust and whether and with what we can trust them in the future.