Half-truth

Examples

• In January 2018, former U.S. President Donald Trump claimed on Twitter that "because of my policies, Black Unemployment has just been reported to be at the LOWEST RATE EVER RECORDED!" Although the unemployment rate for black Americans was indeed at a record low, the rate had been consistently decreasing since 2010, seven years before Trump took office.
• Using a technicality: former U.S. President Bill Clinton famously engaged in a half-truth when he gave the testimony of "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky." Here he engaged in an equivocation fallacy to deliberately indicate one particular meaning of the phrase "sexual relations", while intending another meaning, in order to deliberately mislead the court while still being able to later claim that "my statements were technically correct."
• The classic story about blind men and an elephant. Each blind man touches a different part of the elephant and reaches a different conclusion about the nature of the elephant; while each man's experience of the elephant is accurate, none of them have a full understanding of the nature of the beast. One may be touching the tail and believe that the elephant is long and thin, another may be touching the belly and say that it is round and big.

Politics

Some forms of half-truths are an inescapable part of politics in representative democracies. The reputation of a political candidate can be irreparably damaged if they are exposed in a lie, so a complex style of language has evolved to minimise the chance of this happening. If someone has not said something, they cannot reasonably be accused of lying. As a consequence, politics has become a world where half-truths are expected, and political statements are rarely accepted at face value.

William Safire defines a half-truth, for political purposes, as "a statement accurate enough to require an explanation; and the longer the explanation, the more likely a public reaction of half-belief".

It has been shown that the order of the half-truth makes a difference in reported belief in the statement. That is when a statement begins with a true statement followed by another unrelated statement (either true or false), the statement is believed. However, when the false statement is put in front, then the entire package is less believed regardless if the second part of the argument is true or false. This also indicates the anchoring effect, which is a tendency of people to believe the first thing said which acts as an anchor point in believing, or disbelieving, what follows and is also found in reference pricing used in price promotions. Consumer behaviour and psychology studies show the heavy influence of the order and presentation of information in what beliefs people generally may be likely to form as well as decoy items that may be the early information.

In his 1990 work The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of 1989 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Prague, Timothy Garton Ash responded to Václav Havel's call for "living in truth":

Now we expect many things of politicians in a well-functioning parliamentary democracy. But "living in truth" is not one of them. In fact the essence of democratic politics might rather be described as "working in half-truth". Parliamentary democracy is, at its heart, a system of limited adversarial mendacity, in which each party attempts to present part of the truth as if it were the whole.

Philosopher Alfred North Whitehead was quoted as saying: "There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that play the devil". If this is true, statements, or truths, which according to Whitehead are all half-truths, are susceptible to creating deceptive and false conclusions.

Meme theory

Richard Brodie links half-truths to memes, writing, "the truth of any proposition depends on the assumptions you make in considering it—the distinct memes you use in thinking about it". Brodie considers half-truths a necessary part of human interaction because they allow practical application of ideas when it is impractical to convey all the information needed to make a fully informed decision, although some half-truths can lead to false conclusions or inferences in the world of logic.

Quotations

The notion of half-truths has existed in various cultures, giving rise to several epigrammatic sayings.

• Karl Kraus, an Austrian journalist, critic, playwright, and poet, noted, "An aphorism can never be the whole truth; it is either a half-truth or a truth-and-a-half."
• Arthur Koestler, a Hungarian-British author and journalist, wrote, "Two half-truths do not make a truth, and two half-cultures do not make a culture."

Selective truth

Selective truth is an act of telling some part of truth selectively, both intentionally or unintentionally.

Both intentional and unintentional selective truth are not a truth at all.

Ethics and morality

While selective truth information is not the truth information, whether telling selective truth is considered as deceptive or lying and the morality are subject to debate. Some scholars think it is deceptive and lying and some scholars think the obverse. Some philosophers consider selective truth deceptive but not lying. Some philosophers simply consider it is not lying.