Getting to the Truth: The “Wandering” Metaphor of Mistakenness in Roman Culture

Eve Sweetser’s study of English lie argues that the meaning of this word depends on a “folk theory” of discourse—closely resembling the Gricean “cooperative principle”—in which the normal expectation is that a “speaker’s saying something entails the truth of the thing said.”1 Under this theory, a prototypical lie is defined as an intentionally false statement—that is, a statement the speaker knows to be untrue and which is meant to be deceptive—with less clearcut cases (compliments out of politeness, fictions or jokes for entertainment, “white” lies) occurring when the statement’s truth value is beside the point.2 A mistake is instead the case in which someone believes but does not know the truth value of a statement, and speaks or acts on these grounds.3 At a more basic level English speakers’ conventional understanding of truth—and hence also of mistakenness—also presupposes a figurative understanding of language and thought that corresponds to what Michael Reddy called the “conduit” metaphor.4 In this metaphor, which has predominated in English speakers’ conception at least since the Industrial Revolution in Britain,5 words are imagined as “containers” for the ideas (propositions) they express. The “truth” is thus a correspondence of (verbally expressed) propositions to real-world states of affairs, and a mis-take the failure to metaphorically “get” or “obtain” or “extract” the propositional content that fits a state of affairs existing in the world.6