Re: Truth Value of UI (was: Re: UI for 'possible' (was: Re: [lojban] Bibletra...

[pycyn@aol.com]

In a message dated 1/31/2002 12:46:39 PM Central Standard Time, jimc@MATH.UCLA.EDU writes:

A performative utterance makes things happen by being said.  Example: "Let
there be light", "I now pronounce you man and wife".  A constative
utterance conveys to the listener some information known to the speaker.
This part isn't in the Canon, but let's call it an indicative utterance,
which displays the speaker's emotional or internal state.

While we tend to analyse these categories in isolation, in fact every
utterance shares in all three aspects.  Example: a performative utterance
also lets the listener know that this is the way it's going to be from now
on, whereas a constative ("purely" informational) utterance has the
performative effect of depositing information on the listeners that they're
expected to remember.

As for the indicative utterances, in animal behavior you see a lot of
these, like threat displays or sexual solicitation or group cohesiveness
calls, and humans have a lot more variety.  But clearly if you do your
spoken (or facial) grin ".ui", it also has a constative function to inform
the listener how you feel.  And it also has a performative function in that
often part of your motivation in doing the display is to induce the
listener to join in your feeling, acting through a hardwired emotional
channel.

Thus the designated purpose of selma'o <UI> may be for attitude indicators,
but a constative side effect, with a truth value, should not be rejected.

In Austin's and Grice's salad days even people not generally positively influenced by philosophers were giving the deep structure of informative sentences as being headed by the performative "I hereby inform you that"  or some such thing.  I think (hope) that this has passed from the scene, even if there is something fundamentally right about it.  It is what you do fairly often and what you intend to do, but it is not clear that it is therefore a performance. Or that it should be marked as such.  As for the "indicative" force of most factual utterances, it is so close to null as to require an act of methodological commitment to its being there to find it. 
Conversely, the factual content of an indicative utterance (or act in general -- and the fact that it can be non-verbal is an important distinction here from performatives and constatives) is, I would say, merely evidentiary.  I tend to infer from the fact that a person say {ui} that he is happy, but this bit of evidence can be overriden by all kinds of other evidence: long face, grumbles otherwise,....  And notice that I infer not from the utterance {ui} but from the fact that {ui} is uttered, just as I would infer from a smile or a chuckle or various kinds of analyses of the seratonin level in the blood.  A person who smiles or says {ui} or... but is not happy may be misleading me (and this is true even of seratonin levels, though that is not deliberate generally) but he isn't doing anything false -- simply because he is not making a claim at all.  He is not a liar, even if he is doing it deliberately with the intention to deceive.  {ui} is neither true nor false, uttering {ui} may a good or a scewed indication of attitude.