Paltering

  • (p41) - Kantian Evasion or palter: A truthful statement that is nonetheless misleading

- Book - Essentials of Business Law, 6th Edition, By Jeffrey F. Beatty, Susan S. Samuelson, Patricia Abril

  • 2017 - AP - Artful Paltering: The Risks and Rewards of Using Truthful Statements to Mislead Others, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 112, No. 3, 456-473 - 19p
  • 2016 1205 - Forbes - How To Deceive Others With Truthful Statements (It's Called 'Paltering,' And It's Risky), by HBS Working Knowledge - [link]
  • 2020 - When Intents To Educate Can Misinform: Inadvertent Paltering Through Violations Of Communicative Norms
  • ... when we come to value policies afterwards is a very different question indeed; and I, for one, cannot get over the dictum laid down by Professor De Morgan, that we have to deal with facts.
    • A man is aged x.
    • Well, you must charge yourself with the present value of the assurance upon that man, an credit for a portion of his premiums, that portion being what is conventionally known as the net premium.
    • Now what is net premium?
      • There has been a great deal of paltering with that.
    • Any person that will look carefully into the valuations will find that what some actuaries call a net premium is a net premium at variance with the data which they profess to be valuing.
      • That is not net premium, and it has done much detriment in many companies.
    • But that is a different question altogether.

1875 10 - Actuarial Paper - The Measure of Expenses in Life Assurance Companies, by James R. Macfadyen, Journal of the Institute of Actuaries and Assurance Magazine, Vol. 19, No. 3, pp. 153-174 - (23p - JSTOR)

  • Telling the truth can be used to mislead.
  • The act of deceiving through truthful statements is known as “paltering” [1] and is widely employed in negotiations (e.g., [2]), political discourse (e.g., [3,4]), marketing and sales (e.g., [5,6]), and espionage (e.g., [7]) as well as in many ordinary interactions where speakers hold ulterior motives (e.g., [8,9]).
  • Palterers imply rather than assert falsehoods, leading listeners to draw false inferences from true statements.
  • Paltering is sometimes preferable to flat-out lying because hewing closer to the truth can be more persuasive, can be less likely to be discovered, if discovered can preserve deniability, and can hide speakers’ bias (e.g., [10]).
  • Paltering also offers a way to deceive without experiencing the guilt of lying outright [2].
  • Although genuine paltering is a form of deliberate deception, inadvertent paltering is also possible.
    • What would count as inadvertent paltering?
    • Following Malle and Knobe’s [11] model of a folk concept of intentionality, we suggest that inadvertent paltering takes place when the speaker
      • (a) does not desire to deceive and
      • (b) is not aware of communicating in a misleading way.
    • We have previously presented one case-study in which well-intentioned speakers inadvertently engaged in paltering ([12]; also see [10] for further instances of misleading through pragmatic implications).
    • In the current work, we argue that deliberate paltering is accomplished through strategic violations of communicative norms and that inadvertent violations of these same norms can be equally misleading.
      • We demonstrate the consequences of inadvertent paltering in materials presented on a widely-respected health website.

2020 - AP - When intents to educate can misinform: Inadvertent paltering through violations of communicative norms, by Derek Powell - 16p