To give a much simpler example:
- If an 8-year-old asks "can you mix oil and water", the right answer is "no". If a student is asked that question on a school exam, the right answer is also "no".
- If a chemist asks "can you mix oil and water", the right answer is "yes, and here's how: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJeWklggSpY"
That I had to be 35 before I learned that mayo is basically water mixed with oil, held together by eggs, it's an indication of what kind of education about the world we were getting...
You can certainly reply like that to your 5yo, but it completely misses the point I was making. The video I linked to didn't suddenly modify the outcome being asked about. What it ended up with really was a mixture of plain oil and water, with no other ingredient ever being added to it.
I think that's probably technically accurate, and also practically useless. Even damaging. I saw this in the climate arguments: two sets of different facts led to two different versions of the truth, which led to two completely irreconcilable points of view. Essentially two sets of people shouting "no, but..." and "well, actually..." at each other, pointing to two completely different truths, both supported by two completely different sets of facts. At some point we as a society need to agree on our truth in order to get anything done.
That's really not how I interpret it.
Assuming we agree on what "mixing" means, which itself isn't that trivial but even without a formal definition I think we have the same idea of "homogenous at molecular level on a longish time period".
The truth is "yes you can mix water and oil", there's no doubt about that. It's testable and tested.
The fact that we use context to interpret the question (rather than being entirely literal about it) and decide whether the literal truth is really what's appropriate to answer, doesn't change the nature of truth.
There's also the question of knowledge (I might not know that you actually can mix water and oil), but again that doesn't change the nature of truth.
Like so many philosophical questions, it only sounds interesting because we assign different meanings to the same words: here conflating truth and answer.
No it's not, at all. This isn't a debate about what's true, it's a debate over the intended meaning of the question. The point was that people assume context behind the question and answer based on the context. Because even the person asking often doesn't literally mean what the words say. The question is more than the words that are explicitly written.
Bottom line is that you can't have the bottom line be 'does a person earnestly believe what they're doing is right and good', much less 'do they say they're right'. Can't fall back on that, it's hopelessly inadequate.
These are known as half-truths. We do settle for lies in order to do whatever it is people feel they need to do.
We also settle for lies because there are just things we don't understand yet, but our models are currently correct, and possibly collapsing over millenia to a stable truth.
Sure you can adapt how much context you give based on who's asking, but if it's something factual like this it really shouldn't change from a yes to a no.
If you think they _meant_ to ask a different question that is less vague, it can be clarified
"Water and oil do not mix by hand. However water and oil can mix under some specific conditions like a vacuum, do you want to discuss that in more detail?"