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Morendil comments on Empirical claims, preference claims, and attitude claims - Less Wrong Discussion

5 Post author: John_Maxwell_IV 15 November 2012 07:41PM

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Comment author: Morendil 15 November 2012 03:54:12PM *  3 points [-]

One reason: because I'd assess such an utterance very differently based on who the speaker and what the context was, unlike the other two statements you cited.

Depending on the context, this could be a threat, or an informative statement regarding a policy, and so on. If you're a guest in somebody's home and hear this from your host as they see you pick up a pricey vase, you might interpret it differently than if you hear at a shop from the shop's owner, or from your friend who's shopping with you (in this latter case, it might be an empirical claim, that you'd counter with "no, in this state shops must carry insurance and customers are not liable for unintended breakage").

I'd also disagree with you on the characterization of utterances of the "that was uncalled for" family, and might suggest that the linguistics you deploy in your post is too impoverished to account for them properly. I have only a passing familiarity with speech act theory, Gricean linguistics or relevance theory, but they strike me as better equipped to dissolve the puzzlement you seem to experience on encountering speech of that sort.