Can a True Statement Still Be Deceptive?

In ordinary life, lying and deception are often treated as the same thing, but philosophers usually distinguish them. A common account of lying requires a speaker to assert something they believe to be false, typically with the intention that another person accept it. Deception is broader: it concerns deliberately causing someone to form a false or misleading belief.

That means a literally true sentence can still be used deceptively. Suppose someone asks, “Was he here today?” You know they really want to know whether he is still in the building, but you answer only, “He was here this morning.” The sentence may be true. Yet if you use it deliberately to make the listener infer that he has already left, the moral problem is not captured by truth value alone.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy discusses this distinction in detail and also notes continuing disagreement over whether an intention to deceive is required for lying. My own judgement is that honesty cannot be reduced to whether individual sentences are true. We also have to ask how a speaker is using the structure of available information to shape another person's judgement.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lying-definition/