Zefram wrote:
Kerim Aydin wrote:
Can you point me to a reference in logical or grammatical literature that assigns a truth value to any imperative statement
Mm, that's philosophically a tricky issue. An imperative could contain a counterfactual subordinate clause that make it reasonable to talk about the whole being false. For example, "Goethe, put the red ball in the box on the blue table.": if the blue table does not bear a box then there's something wrong with the imperative, and it smells rather like falsehood.
It certainly doesn't smell like a falsehood to me. It's ill-formed perhaps, but ill-formed doesn't mean false. (Would you equally claim that 1/0 = 1/0 is false?)
They're clearly not, under the rules. They're declarative statements about what one is doing.
No, they're "statements" about what one wishes to be done to the game state. The performance, the thing that one is doing, is the act of posting the message.
Taken strictly, I believe that "I hereby vote FOR proposal 4601" is actually false. What I am hereby doing is writing a text message. A few seconds later, I hit the send button and the message does its merry dance around the Internet. The message has its effect when it hits the PF: when I wrote it, I was writing a falsehood. But this way of interpreting these messages leads to all sorts of ridiculous conclusions.
Michael's suggested specialised non-statement utterances for performing actions would by stipulation have no truth value. They'd certainly have a grammar. As I said earlier regarding this concept, we certainly could take actions this way if the rules allowed it, but this is not the situation we currently have.
I disagree. Long custom and practice has not attached truth values to voting messages. Your interpretation of them as having truth values is the novelty.
Michael.
