Radical honesty proclaims that you say what's on your mind. However instead of saying: "You are angry", you can say "I imagine you are angry".
Is it consistent on this? For instance, does "you are my friend" work this way as well? And if you think your car is running out of gas, do you say "I conclude that my car is running out of gas"? (There's some nonzero probability that your gas gauge malfunctions, after all).
Is it consistent on this?
When speaking about radical honesty I used "can say" because you nothing in radical honesty forces you to use evidentials.
As far as my wish for an ideal language goes I think it's good if the language requires evidentials. When it comes to "I conclude that my car is running out of gas" it's useful to distinguish the fact that you conclude based on reason, your intuition or because an authority told you so.
"You are my friend" can also mean many things. You can say it to mean: "I hereby declare ...
I'm working on a conlang (constructed language) and would like some input from the Less Wrong community. One of the goals is to investigate the old Sapir-Whorf hypothesis regarding language affecting cognition. Does anyone here have any ideas regarding linguistic mechanisms that would encourage more rational thinking, apart from those that are present in the oft-discussed conlangs e-prime, loglan, and its offshoot lojban? Or perhaps mechanisms that are used in one of those conlangs, but might be buried too deeply for a person such as myself, who only has superficial knowledge about them, to have recognized? Any input is welcomed, from other conlangs to crazy ideas.