Question Can dogs lie? Our dog will 'pretend' to bark at something outside the house when it is near time for her meal or she has not been for a walk. As she has other behaviours to get our attention, patting with her paw, staring mournfully, or stand over us on our lounge - she is a big dog - it seems she 'chooses' to 'lie' at times to get our attention.

Accepted:
May 24, 2009

Comments

Good question, and I think it has a lot of philosophical import. Here's why. What we might call a "true lie" is one where the liar knows what she is doing. She knows that she needs to do or say something to alter what her target believes in order to get him to do something the liar wants. Contrast this with a "behavioristic lie," one that has the effect of getting the target to behave a certain way but without the "liar" knowing how she is doing it. Take the case of a 3-year-old girl who has learned that saying "I'm tired" often gets her out of doing something she doesn't want to do. One night her dad says "It's time to go to bed," so she repeats her standard ploy, "I'm tired." She does not seem to know how her lie works!

This difference between "true lying" and "behavioristic lying" seems to make a big difference. Behavioristic lying might not require any especially impressive cognitive abilities. Well, behavioristic learning itself is pretty impressive--and it allows more interesting and flexible forms of deception than, say, animal mimicry (the viceroy butterfly isn't doing anything cognitive in "pretending" to look like the poisonous monarch butterfly). But it's not as impressive as true lying. Your dog's behavior, if it is just behavioristic lying, does not seem to require understanding your mental states--your beliefs, desires, or intentions. Rather, your dog, like the 3-year-old girl, may have simply learned from past experience what works to get what she wants (e.g., to get fed or taken for a walk). Real lying, on the other hand, seems to require understanding that others perceive the world differently from you, they have different desires, beliefs, and intentions than your own. One cannot intentionally manipulate others' beliefs (i.e., truly lie) unless one understands that they have beliefs that can be manipulated (i.e., that can be false).

I happen to think the ability to "truly lie" may be unique to humans' (though perhaps it shows up in some other higher primates or dolphins or perhaps even dogs given their long co-evolution with humans). And I think it likely evolved because of our ancestors' complex social interactions (including reciprocal altruism) and in tandem with our remarkable ability to interpret, explain, and predict the behavior of others and ourselves in terms of beliefs, desires, intentions, etc. Once you've got that ability, you may be on your way to being able to think about alternative possibilities, choosing (freely) in light of such thinking about alternative future outcomes, thinking symbolically, doing philosophy, the whole shabang! Though I'm a bit leery of saying that so much of what makes us human is tied to our remarkable ability to truly lie...