On Mon, 14 Jul 2008, ihope wrote: > On Mon, Jul 14, 2008 at 4:19 PM, Kerim Aydin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> For the current case, I think "I act on behalf of myself" is what a >> speech act is by definition; whenever we say "I do X" we are implicitly >> saying that we are acting on behalf of ourselves. So the pledge is >> a tautology, "I act on behalf of myself to do X" simplifies to "I do X" >> and the deregistration worked. > > "Using the mechanism defined in the above pledge, I act on behalf of > myself to deregister" is only a synonym of "I deregister" if the > pledge allowed me to act on behalf of myself, regardless of whether or > not I could have acted on behalf of myself anyway.
I'm not so sure. Let's say there's two rules: -Rule A authorizes Green players to deregister by announcement. -Rule B authorizes Orange players to deregister by announcement. If a Green player says "I deregister" with no qualification, it's not Rule B that is triggered, it's Rule A, and we ignore Rule B. But if a Green person says "Using Rule B, I deregister", does it fail? Or does the qualifier get ignored as inaccurate, while the second part triggers Rule A? I think we've had a few cases where someone has said "by Rule X, I do Y" and it turns out that Rule X doesn't allow Y, but Rule Z does. One example is when I deregistered non-person partnerships last fall. We've (I think!) as a general custom allowed the action to stand, perhaps as a convenience akin to allowing voting "10x" something. This has never been tested in court. > Please don't be a jerk and rule that contracts can allow people to act > on behalf of themselves but nobody else. :-P Hmmm... ;) -Goethe