Subject: Re: [lojban] RECORD: emotions

From: "James F. Carter" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 19 May 2000 09:38:09 -0700 (PDT)

This seems related (not identical) to the performative <-> constative
duality. Performative: saying it makes it true. "I now pronounce you man
and wife". Constative: the speaker just wants to convey information. 
"Those two got married yesterday."

It would seem to me that none of these, performative, constative nor
expressing an emotion, have a whole lot to do with "making a claim", which
to my mind means acting like a philosopher and staking out an intellectual
position and aggressively asserting its truth value against the opposition
of jackass competitors.

[Let X = author of "How to Say Things with Words", which pc recommended
that I read many years ago, and which is now out of the catalog at
UCLA! Hiss, boo! So I can't refresh my memory, which is bad about
people.]

But having defined "performative" and "constative", X pointed out that any
utterance has a tendency to be both at once, just more or less. And when
the spouse says "you didn't send me flowers", the response will definitely
end up as a combination of expressing the emotion of painful separation,
plus conveying the fact that it was felt at the prior time, plus
establishing one's sincerity (one hopes) by saying the appropriate words,
plus staking out a claim of innocence if the hoped-for effect of the
previous three aspects fails to mollify the spouse.

In Lojban, how do you tag a bridi to indicate that it's performative?

James F. Carter Voice 310 825 2897	FAX 310 206 6673
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On Fri, 19 May 2000 [email-masked] wrote:

> Note the difference between saying you have an emotion and expressing that 
> emotion. The first is either true or false, the second is neither, but 
> operates at a more basic level, displaying the emotion, not talking about it. 
> ...