Re: meanings not in english

Nik Taylor wrote at 2003-05-12 19:42:52 (-0500)
 > Robert B Wilson wrote:
 > > it's more logical to me than distinguishing just intention. the
 > > result is often more important than the intention. if a person
 > > intends to fly from the top of one skyskraper to another by
 > > flapping their arms, their intention doesn't matter... they still
 > > go splat.  i don't see why a language shouldn't distinguish both,
 > > though...
 >
 > But, it's easier to know one's own intention than effect.  If I lie
 > and tell someone their cooking was good when it was actually bad,
 > is that beneficial or malicious?  It's debatable.  But, I can
 > definitely know for a fact that I *intended* it to be beneficial.
 >

While I'm agnostic on whether it's more useful for a language to
encode intention or effect, my understanding is that the words
"malicious" and "malice" explicitly refer to to intent, so there's no
such thing as a "malicious effect" in standard English.

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