On Tue, Jul 15, 2008 at 12:36 PM, Elliott Hird <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > First, let's take a look at how performing actions by announcement works. > You write a message stating that you perform an action, and somehow, when you > send off the message, it happens. (Note that this is actually ISTID, except > it's rule-sanctioned.)
It's not ISIDTID, which is specifically the fallacy that announcing the performance of an arbitrary action is actually performing the action, as if this were some sort of role-playing game. The rules don't empower ISIDTID; rather they ascribe significance to particular kinds of announcements that mostly happen to take the form of actions. > Now, the announcement that performs an action is obviously a statement. But it > does not seem to imply that anything is true or false - at a stretch, we can > say that it states that the action it purports to perform is successful. But I > think this is too much of a stretch - it does not in fact say that and it's > quite a leap to infer that from the action. It's a statement that the rules attach special significance to. The fact that they attach special significance to it does not deprive it of its normal meaning. Despite the fact that it triggers an action, the statement "I register" is still a true/false statement about whether somebody does something. Contrastingly, the statement "I pet the dog" is not significant to the rules, but it again is a true/false statement about whether an action is performed. If one were to argue that it is not, simply because it is similar in form to some statements that the rules do care about, that would indeed appear to be an example of ISIDTID. > Also note that if an action is not performed by announcement, it does not have > a statement attached to it and therefore can fail without consequence by some > recent (proto-)proposals. Presumably, but that's not really relevant. The purpose of R2149 is to forbid dishonesty in the public forum, not dishonesty in just any medium. As an example, suppose we printed up some actual ribbons, and we changed R2199 to care about physical ribbon possession instead of an abstract record of their ownership. Then the action of destroying one of my ribbons would consist of getting out a pair of scissors and physically cutting up the ribbon. I could legally use sleight of hand to pretend to destroy a ribbon without actually doing so, but I would still need to be honest about it when later discussing my holdings in the PF. There might be cause to make such an act illegal in the first place, but there is no reason that it should be covered specifically by R2149. > I'd also argue that failing actions/announcements causing failing > announcements > being illegal, even if the performer thinks they'll fail, is decidedly > non-Agoran. Intentionally failing to perform an action is a form of dishonesty, and it should be every bit as illegal as any other lie. Do you have a specific scenario in mind where this is not the case? -root
