It’s not your fault that the listener assumed you were divorced; you implied it (accidentally) but did not state it. You were not untruthful-what you said was literally and exactly correct.
The assumptions made by a listener as a result of intentionally limited data are not your responsibility in any way, indeed even if you were able to predict them with any reasonable level of accuracy, which you are not.
I find it unlikely that you really abide by this stated disregard of implicit assumptions - it would make communication impossible. The amount of information required to convey even basic facts is encyclopedic if you and your conversational partner don’t make use of assumptions about what the other already knows.
And indeed, reasonable people can disagree on the extent of what is safe to assume and what is not, and can discuss the nature of their belief in the reasonability of those various levels of assumption.
It turns out that if you abide by those linked rules, casual friendly discussions (things that are nonessential, for the most part) are pretty much ruled out. I find myself more often communicating with people who I have no explicit business or goal with, in social settings, and abiding by rules for cooperation on a team/task would make me a very boring person to speak to, indeed.
Thinking about fault and responsibility is maybe misleading? If I'm trying to communicate a thing to another person and I fail, I've failed. Totally failed. Whether that bothers me or not depends on the context, sometimes it does. And it seems like at those points just saying "Well I made noises, it's the others persons fault they couldn't understand me, nothing to do with me" is an attitude that isn't going to get me far in life. Basically, if you want to achieve your task of "communicate a thing" you HAVE to think about the listener.
You also have to ignore the listener that don't listen or that don't understand, despite others did or have never put themselves in the condition of needing an explanation.
Basically communication is bidirectional, if the listener don't understand anything, it's probably their fault too.
Understanding is not a right or a gift, it's a process.
You can't force people to understand and no matter how you think about the listener, the listener have to do their part: listen.
> Basically communication is bidirectional, if the listener don't understand anything, it's probably their fault too.
I wouldn't say "probably". It might be. It might be the fault of the speaker. Or maybe both. Basically, my point was that it's not ONLY the listener's fault.
I would say that responsibility for success in communication depends mainly on intentional aspects of the communication and may fall on either speaker or listener (or both).
I.e., both sides have some level of expected interest/gain in successful communication and that makes each of them implicitly responsible (at least to themselves) for their part of gain from communication.
Lie by omission is more problematic concept than explicit lie. IMHO one has almost always moral duty to not explicitly lie, but just rarely duty to not 'lie' by omission, depends mainly on whether the person has duty to communicate that information or whether one actively tries to deceive.
Yup. An example would be listening to someone reach the wrong conclusion, and by staying silent and not correcting them, implying that they were correct.
Objectively, it does not: it implies that, but does not denote it. You are reading your own implicit assumptions about the statement as fact. He simply never said that.
At no point in the events described did he do anything other than “simply tell the truth”. The words he quoted himself as saying were factually accurate.
The assumptions made by a listener as a result of intentionally limited data are not your responsibility in any way, indeed even if you were able to predict them with any reasonable level of accuracy, which you are not.
I have an essay pending on this exact topic.