Kerim Aydin wrote: >It was questions of type "I do X" we were concerned with though, weren't we?
Er, it's those that we are generally most concerned with in Agora. I don't recall what the context was for discussing imperatives. > it is untrue as you type it but becomes >true when you hit the send key. It is true at the time the statement is made for Agoran purposes. I find it becomes clearer if you insert the elided "hereby". Read "hereby" as "by the process of sending this message". > For some things, it's even hazier: "I >hereby notify you of X" isn't arguably true until X has been sent via the >forum to you. Looks fine to me. The statement is made, for Agoran purposes, by the process of sending the message containing it via the PF, and that is the same process that notifies the target. >In other words, we need to reconsider/set precedents on the truth or falsity >of (failed or successful) Speech Acts. I think we are lacking in precedents here, but it's pretty clear what position the courts should take. An attempt to act by announcement is, first and foremost, the making of a statement. The fact that rules do, or might, cause an announcement to have side effects on the game state does not deprive it of statementhood or of having a truth value. A successful action by announcement is the making of a true statement. We don't need to evaluate a statement at more than one point in time, because the rules only ascribe significance to the statement at one point in time. Actually, although we speak of it as an instant, we have some precedent that sending a message through the PF is a non-instantaneous process, so the statement takes effect in the course of that process and its meaning must be evaluated from the point of view of that process. A disclaimer along the lines of "Any statement apparently made in this message might be false." disclaims all information content of the message. It renders the message as a whole informationally null. Such a message, taken as whole, therefore does not make any statements, and cannot constitute announcing anything. It would therefore fail to qualify for acting by announcement. The disclaimer "These attempted actions may fail." is more interesting. It does indicate that the statements that attempt actions might be false, but it does so in a qualified way. They can't be false for arbitrary reasons. The disclaimer indicates specifically that they may be false purely due to the described action being impossible. It does not disclaim any other way in which they could be false. So I think this disclaimer does allow attempted actions to take effect, where the actions are possible, and avoids the message constituting a lie where they are not. An attempted action of "I hereby spend my two C notes to cause Murphy to gain a C note." would still be a lie, under that disclaimer, if I didn't have exactly two C notes, so that the phrase "my two C notes" has no valid referent. Btw, I think the formulation "If possible, I do X." is preferable over "I do X. Disclaimer: this might fail.". -zefram
