Cyan points out, correctly, that all the reader can consider is that I claim to have held a certain position since 1992. But that is useful information for evaluating my claim that I am not just signaling because a person is less likely to have deceived himself about having held a position than about his motivations for a sequence of speech acts! And I can add a second piece of useful information in the form of the following archived email. Of course I could be lying when I say that I found the following message on my hard drive, but participants in this conversation willing to lie outright are (much) less frequent than participants who have somehow managed to deceive themselves about whether they really held a certain position since 1992, who in turn are less frequent than participants who have somehow managed to deceive themselves about their real motivation for advocating a certain position.

1995 Jul 4 16:20

Subject: Re: July 15th

Russell Brand writes:

Will you be able to join us at my house to hear John David Garcia talk about the mechanisms for thought, creativity and quantum mechanics?

I certainly would like to join you. Garcian ethics has become an important part of my philosophy, and I want to meet people who assign a similar importance to the ethical principles outlined in Creative Transformation.