On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 3:41 PM, Kerim Aydin <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Whether
>> common-language suggestions can be modified without retracting or
>> remaking them is, I suspect, normally irrelevant in conversation; I
>> expect that altering a suggestion would be treated as an entirely
>> possible action in real-life, and whether that is just an abbreviation
>> for making a different similar suggestion is nearly always irrelevant,
>> confined just to the outer realms of philosophical argument (and nomic,
>> of course). That makes it not particularly helpful...
>
> It is, in fact, helpful. But I'll not claim it as a slam-dunk.
Oh, I agree that informal 'proposals' in ordinary language are treated
as literals. But informally it's nonsensical to say "I like my
proposal but not your completely identical proposal". Indeed, we use
this language informally in Agora-- 'I'll resubmit the proposal but
with a corrected AI', not 'I'll submit a new proposal with the same
text as the old proposal but a corrected AI'.-- but this suggests an
organization of the Proposal Pool such that a proposal is just text
('foobar'); the Proposal Pool consists of a list of ordered pairs of
(id number, proposal, ai, ii) and can contain duplicates of the same
proposal. Such a layout makes the most ordinary-language sense but
contradicts the assignment of AI, ID number, etc. directly to the
proposal by the Rules.
