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.
I won't attempt to provide a reference, though. I have not so far made
any argument regarding imperatives, and in particular I have not taken
a position on this issue. I don't need to, because:
>I think it's reasonable to consider Agoran action statements to be
>imperatives
They're clearly not, under the rules. They're declarative statements
about what one is doing.
>towards Agora (the collected recordkeepers) to take note.
The rules, directly and (more often) indirectly, oblige recordkeepors
to take note of certain game actions. Most of the relevant game actions
are taken by announcement. This does not make the action announcement a
command, though. The imperative content comes from the rules, commonly
from R2143:
The holder of an office for which there is an officer's
report is obliged to maintain all information in the report.
It is this rule that obliges the assessor to make a note of a VC spend.
If no one were obliged to track VCs then the act of spending the VCs
would be just the same, but would not trigger this obligation.
Also, tangentially, note that the rules never actually use the imperative
grammatical mood (except R2029, under comex's dubious interpretation in
CFJ 1736). Obligations are always created by declaratives, such as the
"... is obliged to ..." quoted above and the "... SHALL ..." of MMI.
>In fact, MMI recently strengthened the imperative nature of actions.
I don't see how you reach this conclusion. MMI provides a clearer
way for the rules to express obligations; it doesn't affect the
action-by-announcement mechanism.
>Even if Agoran action statements are not imperatives, the example of
>a grammatical construction without a truth value implies that there can
>be others.
Not sure whether you've actually found an example, but I don't deny that
there could be such a thing. I think filler interjections such as "umm"
are sufficiently denotation-free to have no truth value, and one could
probably identify a class of functional speech constructs that can be
treated the same way.
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.
-zefram
