Criteria for lying is pretty simple. You have what is actually fact and then you have awareness thereof. Both must be present in the face of a representation that is not factual in order to constitute a lie. Obviously if someone doesn't know the actual facts of something they are not lying -- they may be erring, but they are not lying.

Factuality varies with situation and topic. The level of factual accuracy required can be different for answering about something abstract as opposed to answering about a particular concrete event. The more literal and concrete the matter in question, the more "black and white" the determination of lying can become, because concrete facts can be verified or disproven. Whereas a personal experience mingled with perceptions and impressions of that experience layered underneath an icing of personal belief system and how it relates to the particular interpretation of the meaning of that experience, and sprinkled with the effort of translating all of the above into a common vernacular for relaying, can make for a rather colorful, complicated, cavernous cake indeed, where the question of "lie versus truth" can be swept away in the tides of subjectivity.

Allautumn, I thought the stuff you wrote in your earlier post (#96874) was dynamite. Thanks for putting it out there~! I tend to regard myself as what I call "pathologically honest". There's no virtue in it whatsoever; it's utterly compulsive and beyond my control. I am highly allergic to lying and quick to spot it in another, particularly when it is of the complicated social-dance variety, the sort of lie that is played out rather than told, if you know what I mean. The ability to see through people socio-emotionally without even trying is a hard curse to bear; it creates something of a Cassandra complex for me, because everything becomes a catch-22 whenever another person is less than honest with me. I feel like if I play along I am taken for a fool, yet if I try to unmask them, they simply mock me by claiming I am just being paranoid, oversensitive, overpersonalizing, etc. WHATEVER. (**kill**)