Re: USAGE: mandatory veracity & pygectomy (was: RE: USAGE: WOMYN (was: RE:

John Cowan
> And Rosta scripsit:
>
> > Lojban attitudinals
> > are like 'ouch' and 'wow' -- they *express* emotion and attitude
> > without making truth-conditional claims, yes, but as with the
> > English interjections one may use them without really the emotion
> > or ironically.
>
> Unlike the ironic uses of Eng. intj., though, this is highly
> un-Gricean and ought not to be done.
>
> > Lojban community does comprise some who wish to police our usage
> > so that all Lojban usage is most puritanically literal --
>
> I think one need not be committed to literalism to believe that
> truth-telling is good, lying is bad, and that lying with attitudinals
> is a more fundamental form of lying than lying with truth-functional
> statements, where irony is always a possibility.
That is so, but it remains the case that to be nonliteral is not
necessarily to lie, since it may fail to deceive and/or lack the
intent to deceive. There is nothing un-Gricean about nonliteral
exclamations or, say, nonliteral facial expressions; we use them
all the time to griceanly communicate.

What makes the Livagian situation different is that there is a taboo
against gricean circumventions of literalness, because it devalues
the linguistic coin, and forces on all meaning the uncertainties
of contextual contingency.

--And.