Evidentiality: A cure for Trump’s Pathological Lying

by Madeleine Kando

In about a quarter of the world's languages, every statement one makes must specify whether you personally witnessed it, heard it from someone else, or inferred it. It is called ‘evidentiality’. It is the evidence one has for the truth of a given statement. Unfortunately, the English language relies on extra words to show how valid the source is of what someone proclaims: “I heard that…” and “I saw.”

But some languages have this evidentiality baked into their language, so that you cannot just say ‘the car drove off the road’. You have to specify: ‘I saw the car drive off the road’, or ‘I heard him say the car drove off the road’, or ‘I heard the car drive off the road’, etc.

In such a language, when Trump says ‘Hillary deleted emails’, it means that he actually saw her delete them. If he only heard or read about it, it would be impossible for him to say ‘Hillary deleted emails’. Nobody would believe him, since everyone knows he never lived with Hillary and was able to look over her shoulder while she was deleting them. In other words, they make a difference between direct experience, inference and conjecture, and the truth of a statement is measured according to these markers.

In English, you cannot say anything without specifying WHEN it happened. Contrary to the concept of truth, the concept of time is baked into our language. You cannot just say ‘John to walk’. That is grammatically incorrect and it doesn’t make sense to any English-speaking person. You have to specify: ‘He walks’, ‘he walked’ or ‘he will walk’ etc. In Mandarin, however, you can say ‘John to walk’. Whether John walked yesterday, today, or tomorrow, doesn’t matter because you get that information from the context.

In French, the concept of gender is baked into the language. Everything is either masculine or feminine. If you said: ‘la soleil est chaude’ instead of ‘le soleil est chaud’ (the sun is hot), people would know you are a foreigner who has not mastered speaking proper French, or worse, you are a moron.

So you see, languages give priority to certain concepts over others. English gives the truth concept a voluntary status. You can specify whether you witnessed something or just heard about it happening, but you don’t have to. That gives pathological liars like Trump a lot of room to manipulate facts.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could make a temporary rule, just until the elections are over, that our candidates and especially the press, be required to use ‘evidentials’ to accompany every statement they make, by telling us whether they witnessed it, heard about it or just plain invented it? leave comment here