Michael Norrish wrote:
>It certainly doesn't smell like a falsehood to me. It's ill-formed
>perhaps, but ill-formed doesn't mean false.
The fault with it is exactly the same thing that is at fault with the
declarative statement "The red ball is in the box on the blue table.".
Supposing, again, that the blue table does not bear a box, is this
statement false? Presumably you see it as ill-formed rather than false.
It's definitely misleading. Anyway, I won't take a strong postition on
this issue for now.
> (Would you equally claim
>that 1/0 = 1/0 is false?)
Mm, there's certainly a reasonable sense in which it's false. It's
claiming an equality where there isn't one. I'll defer to Maud on this
one, though.
>No, they're "statements" about what one wishes to be done to the game
>state.
I refer once again to rule 478:
A player performs an action "by announcement" by announcing that
e performs it.
An announcement that one is performing an action is a statement about
one and that action. The reason for making the statement is (presumably)
a desire to make a change to the game state, but that motivation is not
part of the message.
> The performance, the thing that one is doing, is the act of
>posting the message.
If you're going to argue that, the the thing that one is doing is actually
to instruct your MUA to send the message. No, actually what you're doing
is to press the "y" key on your keyboard. No, actually what you're
doing is to send control signals to your muscles. You get the idea.
You act on many levels at once.
>Taken strictly, I believe that "I hereby vote FOR proposal 4601" is
>actually false. What I am hereby doing is writing a text message.
No, writing a text message is what you're doing directly (well, via
neurons, muscles, a keyboard, an OS, a MUA, ...). "Hereby" flags the
*next* level of action beyond the message. "Hereby" indicates that the
action is accomplished by the means of sending the message. Which in
this case it is.
> The message has its effect when it
>hits the PF: when I wrote it, I was writing a falsehood.
We always write messages for the context of when they hit the PF.
The time that you typed the characters is not an appropriate context
in which to judge its truth value; it must be judged in the context
of it being a public message. That is the context to which the rules
attach significance. In the context of it hitting the PF, the message
*does* achieve the act of voting (via R478 and R683), so its "hereby"
bit is true.
-zefram
