Who gets to decide when someone is lying?

[BrokenQuill92]

I thought facts get to decide when someone is lying

[Clueless Morgan]

I thought facts get to decide when someone is lying

That's kind of my point, and the crux of my question: the person who gets to decide if someone is lying is the person who discovers that the statements of the liar not only go against facts or evidence, but that the liar also knew of such facts and evidence and didn't disclose them or active sought to suppress them so they could perpetuate their lie as truth.

For instance, the person who created the Piltdown Man skull was intentionally perpetrating a lie by suppressing the fact that the skull was a forgery.

The person who discovered the skull was not perpetrating a lie because they were not aware that the skull was not a genuine fossil; in other words, they were not aware of the relevant fact that the skull was a forgery and omission of that fact by the discoverer doesn't necessarily constitute a lie on the part of the discoverer (unless it is shown that the discoverer had prior knowledge that the skull was a forgery, thus they would the be considered an accomplice to the liar).

The people who discovered that the Piltdown Man skull was a hoax were the only people who could expose the skull as a forgery precisely because they found evidence that the skull was a forgery.

Seeing as how the thread is going in a different direction from my OP I'll conclude that I don't think my reasoning is circular and let the thread drift with the wind of conversation from here.

[Esquilax]

Lies require an intent to obscure the facts of a given scenario, in the knowledge that the story you're telling is, in fact, a lie.

I once got into a fairly heated argument with my dad when I was a teenager, after something I'd told him had later turned out to be incorrect. He kept getting on my case about lying to him, and I eventually exploded:

"That doesn't mean I was lying, it means I was wrong."

I think that sums it up about as well as anything else.

[Angrboda]

The problem with laying out the discovery of a falshood as a lie is that you're constructing a hypothesis about what someone did. You, in the general case, will never have sufficient evidence to prove your hypothesis correct, and quite frequently, such hypotheses are very self-serving, as self-serving as the supposed lies they're meant to expose. You don't know that the person who created the Piltdown fossil meant to pass it off as real, nor that those who passed it off as real had any knowledge of its creation. You've created "a story" out of whole cloth, and presumed that the truth of the lie depends upon the plausibility of the story, and its consistency with known facts. It doesn't. It depends on your "story" being what actually happened, and you're no less biased in the creation of your "story" than any other actor is. The only person with actual knowledge of which story is actually the case, in your scenario, is excluded from testifying as to what the case is. Instead, you're substituting people who are not in a position to actually know, and judging on how good their hypothesis seems. (And as I point out to biblical apologists, who frequently come up with just-so stories that are consistent but not necessarily true, consistency is a very low bar on the ladder toward truth. Consistency as your highest criterion leads to what is known as verificationism, the epistemology of only checking to see what confirms your hypothesis, not what might disconfirm it. That revolution came from Karl Popper and his views on falsification. Ask yourself this: what facts would show that Piltdown was not the result of intentional deceit, and have you looked for those facts which would acquit the actors of intentional deceit in Piltdown? I'm guessing you haven't looked for such facts and have concentrated solely on confirming your hypothesis. According to modern philosophy of science, that's a flawed approach. [I've actually read in-depth accounts of the Piltdown hoax and the principal actors likely involved, and from that reading, it seemed clear that we don't know what happened in the case of Piltdown. It seems very shaky to posit that somebody was guilty of intentional deceit if you don't even have the first clue what actually happened.])