Jason Cobb wrote:
2.6.1 Rule 2152
Rule 2152 ("Mother, May I?") is the rule that defines that pertain to
entities attempting to do things, and (generally people) being punished
for or required to do something. Thus, rules that depend on R2152 could
be considered to be more "pragmatic", dealing with the knowledge that
sometimes people may attempt to do things that they cannot, or they
might do something illegal, while rules that don't depend on this rule
can be said to be more "platonic" (names shamelessly stolen from
[VANYEL] (RIP nomic.net)).
R2152 actually covers both of those, using CANNOT (etc.) for platonic
cases and MAY NOT (etc.) for pragmatic cases. So a rule taking the
platonic approach to its subject may or may not make that approach
explicit by depending on the relevant parts of R2152.
IIRC, common usage of Vanyel's terms drifted over time: "platonic" came
to refer to games interpreted as having some objective gamestate
independent of what anyone believed it was, "pragmatic" to the
interpretation that only player consensus matters, and "plato-pragmatic"
to rules that platonically implement pragmatic outcomes where desired,
e.g. stating that events only occur when announced (avoiding "occurs
automatically at time T" triggers), or mechanisms like ratification that
platonically adjust the objective gamestate to match some definition of
platonic consensus. The latter goes back to at least late 1994, e.g.
https://www.fysh.org/~zefram/agora/vanyel0_lr_19941122.mbox
includes a proto-ratification clause in the last paragraph of Rule 925.
