means: “to deceive,” for example, to deceive another person by giving him not what he expects to see but something else that looks like it. In deceptive speech, therefore, I put into words not what I have in mind but something different. The person expects to hear what I have in mind, but I say something else. So speech can either uncover or misrepresent what I am speaking about. To show that the concept of ψεύδεσθαι is the opposite of “to uncover,” we translate it as “to cover-over.” This translation is all the more justified by the fact that a false sentence need not be uttered by a “false person,” someone who is insincere and intent on deception. The other side of the coin is that every false statement uttered, even if uttered without the intent to deceive, is objectively misleading, a misrepresentation, because as a statement about something, it automatically gives the appearance of saying something about that thing, whereas in fact it covers it over and deceives.
Let us try to understand the issue more adequately by translating the sentence as follows:
The only speech that indicatively shows something, {and thus is a statement,} is speech in which uncovering or covering-over is present.
The Greek word that we translate as “is present,” is ὑπάρχειν, “to be there.” But in this case it does not have the meaning it often can, namely, “occurring” in the quite broad sense of “there is something,” as if Aristotle meant to say: “Only such speech is indicative in which uncovering and covering-over occurs”—as if covering and uncovering could sometimes occur, and sometimes not. Here, instead, ὑπάρχεινhas the weighty sense of the philosophical concept that is used by Aristotle: ὑπάρχειν means “being there a priori,” “underlying something in such a way that everything else is sustained by this thing that is there a priori.” For that reason Boethius translates the Greek ὑπάρχεινin an entirely correct way as “in-esse,” “being-within-[something],” in this case: “belonging to the very essence of speaking.” [133] Therefore we have to translate it as follows:
Only that speaking in which uncovering or covering-over sustains and determines the authentic intention of the speaking is an indicative {state-ment} that shows something.
Now the second part of the text (17a1) becomes clearer, and we can understand the distinction Aristotle has made.
Not all ways of speaking are primarily oriented to uncovering and cover-ing-over. For example, a request is speech, but as a request, it neither un-covers nor covers-over.