comex wrote:
On 8/29/07, Kerim Aydin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
You confuse cause and effect. The game doesn't make the statement itself
"true", the statement makes the game condition true, if the game allows.
True. Right now,
I vote FOR
is a statement I believe is false. However, if this is a message to
business, the statement (i.e. I am voting FOR right now) will be true
at some instant immediately after it reaches the list, or at least I
believe it would be; I wouldn't believe such if I was intentionally
casting an invalid vote.
Imagining that these statements have truth values is an unfortunate
consequence of their English phrasing. If the rule for casting votes
insisted that they could only appear in a post to the PF in the form of
the number of the proposal followed by the string "FOR" or "AGAINST",
then there would be no possible truth value in the post, and it would
have to be regarded purely as a vote. (That vote might be disregarded,
rule invalid, or heeded only in part, but that would still not
constitute assigning the message a truth value.)
Given long game custom to the effect that all messages of the English
form "I vote X on Y" and variants are to be regarded in the same manner,
trumping their apparent English meaning. I think it's a type error to
imagine they have truth values.
In particular, I would argue that "i vote FOR proposal 3601 and 3 = 4"
is simply ill-formed and doesn't have a truth value at all.
Michael.
