Who gets to decide when someone is lying?

[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.])