Does "mislead" imply intent?

Someone is saying that he feels "misled" due to false or imprecise information given to him. Does that choice of words imply that from his perspective this false information was given intentionally or at least carelessly?

I would argue for no: mislead doesn't imply intent, though it's certainly compatible with it.

When I tell someone "Sorry if I misled you", I'm not admitting an act of deception; I'm saying that I said something that may have given them a misunderstanding.

When we say "unintentionally misled" or "accidentally misled", this is not a contradiction in terms; it merely means that someone unintentionally led someone else to misunderstand something. "Intentionally misled", likewise, is not redundant.

When we speak of a "misleading example", the example obviously has no intent, but furthermore, the person who gave the example usually had no intent to deceive, either. (But sometimes they did. I recommend looking through the Google Books hits for this one; in most cases it's clear that it was unintentional, but in some cases it can be read as intentional or at least suspicious.)

Edited to add: In a comment to this answer, lbf points out that all of these examples have context. This was obviously intentional on my part — the context is what provides evidence of how it's meant to be understood — but it's a fair point that sometimes a word or phrase ordinarily suggests something narrower than it necessarily requires, such that context can completely change what's being suggested; for example, if I say "We lost the game", you'll assume it was unintentional (to the point that "We unintentionally lost the game" will usually sound odd), but "We intentionally lost the game" is not a contradiction. Conversely, if I say "I turned the machine on", you'll assume it was intentional (to the point that "I intentionally turned the machine on" will usually sound odd), but "I accidentally turned the machine on" is not a contradiction.

I think that, barring such context, mislead can really go either way; the results of a Google Books Search for "mislead investigators", for example, seem to be pretty evenly split between cases of seeming intentional deception and cases where such an interpretation is not possible. Neither "intentionally misled" nor "unintentionally misled" sounds odd.

In your example, "I feel misled", I would expect that the speaker has chosen this phrasing specifically so as to avoid suggesting that it was necessarily intentional; otherwise he would more likely say "I feel lied to", or at least "I feel that you misled me." But that doesn't mean that the speaker doesn't think it was intentional — merely that he's decided not to phrase his statement in a way that too strongly suggests that it was.

I would argue for yes.

Though it isn't for certain that the action of providing imprecise information is actually intentional, from the point of view of the person saying that they feel misled implies a wrong direction from the provider of the information to the recipient.

If the misinformation caused the person saying this to be in a state of error, and the recipient acknowledges that the action was not deliberate, and that the information as they received it was of a different nature than their original perception, then they weren't misled, they simply otherwise misunderstood.

Interestingly enough, many 'knowledge'-describing words are somewhat vague. 'True' and 'false' are incontrovertible (except when people are using them sloppily) but between those two there's a lot of room.

When a statement by a person is wrong, there are many internal states of the utterer that are relevant. Of the ways to say a falsehood, in some vague order of malevolence, there's lying, 'white lie', misleading, wrong.

A lie is flat out intentionally and consciously wrong. The liar is a lying bastard and totally meant to say that. "I did not steal that money, that guy did." He's just trying to shift blame.

A 'white liar' is saying something that is not true, but mostly when the truth is somehow not actionable and will only make the hearer feel bad. "You'll get back all your money." The bank investigators probably won't be able to find it all, they're doing the best they can do.

Someone who is misleading says something that is totally true but in the end not relevant. It can be malevolent, or it can be done out of lack of knowledge. "I was on my lunch hour when the transaction took place." That may have been true but you could have set up an automatic withdrawal for that time, maybe you did (and were guilty), or maybe you didn't (and thought you had to be present to steal), but either way, it was stolen electronically.

Someone who is wrong or mistaken had an error of perception or misinterpreted facts. "The amount was only $10.00" when it may have been $1000.

So someone who is misleading may have done so intentionally or not.