Detail: http://zenith.homelinux.net/cotc/viewcase.php?cfj=3129 ============================== CFJ 3129 ============================== Do or did I register. ? ======================================================================== Caller: ehird Judge: Pavitra Judgement: MALFORMED Judge: Pavitra Judgement: UNDETERMINED ======================================================================== History: Called by ehird: 05 Dec 2011 21:02:38 GMT Assigned to Pavitra: 06 Dec 2011 08:54:14 GMT Judged MALFORMED by Pavitra: 06 Dec 2011 22:45:51 GMT Reconsideration requested by omd: 07 Dec 2011 00:51:13 GMT Reconsideration requested by Murphy: 07 Dec 2011 01:08:58 GMT Reconsideration requested by ehird: 07 Dec 2011 20:27:16 GMT Assigned to Pavitra: 07 Dec 2011 20:27:16 GMT Judged UNDETERMINED by Pavitra: 08 Dec 2011 05:16:46 GMT ======================================================================== Caller's Evidence: Do or did I register. ? (CFJ.) ======================================================================== Gratuitous Arguments by Murphy: Trivially TRUE; whoever initiated this case did register at some point, though not necessarily recently. ======================================================================== Gratuitous Evidence by Murphy: If the above-quoted message failed to initiate a judicial case, then I initiate one with the statement "Do or did I register. ?" ======================================================================== Gratuitous Arguments by ehird: On 6 December 2011 08:37, Elliott Hird wrote: > I intend the newlines to be a vital part of the statement. Oh, and (non-)arguments: The three possible ambiguous temporal points that the CFJ's statement could be evaluated at is also intended to be relevant. ======================================================================== Gratuitous Arguments by Tanner L. Swett: to me, "did I register?" sounds like it's asking about a specific time period (in this case, the time that the ehird's message was sent), much the way that "did you buy milk at the gas station?" is asking only about the most recent trip outside. ======================================================================== Gratuitous Arguments by ehird: I was going for an ambiguity with the fact that the indication of the message's CFJ nature, and thus arguably the calling of the CFJ, occurs after the isolated registration statement; so "did I register?" would be TRUE as I would have done so immediately prior. But at the same time, spatially, "did I" appears before the registration statement. And "do [...] I register" can be read as one statement, such that the CFJ is interpreted to be referring to events at the same time as the registration, in which case it would be TRUE. ======================================================================== Gratuitous Arguments by Murphy: See CFJ 1267. ======================================================================== Judge Pavitra's Arguments: First, the caller's stated intention that "the newlines be a vital part of the statement" is wholly irrelevant, as whitespace insensitivity is Rule rather than custom. R754(1): A difference between two nonempty spans of whitespace is inconsequential in all forms of communication for all purposes. The original message therefore reads, in full: { Do or did I register. ? (CFJ.) } I accept H. CotC Murphy's reading that the "(CFJ.)" is not part of the statement text. I considered trying to treat "Do or did I register." as a statement or speech act, and "?" as the entire CFJ statement, but "Do or did I register." simply does not work as a non-question. Furthermore, it clearly does not work as a question either, because it is -- obviously deliberately -- terminated in a period. R754(1) is no help here, because the difference is one of punctuation (grammar) rather than whitespace, and the difference does in fact create an ambiguity of meaning. I am forced to conclude that the entire message is malformed and meaningless. The only sense that can be extracted is that there was a CFJ called, and that it was supposed to have something to do with registration by the caller, possibly past and/or hypothetical. ======================================================================== Request for reconsideration by omd: I intend to call for reconsideration with two support: "Do I or did I register?" is a well-formed yes/no question per R591. ======================================================================== Request for reconsideration by Murphy: Support. omd's text within quotes differs from the statement by a period and an instance of whitespace, but is nevertheless reasonably close, whereas no other well-formed statement or yes/no question is. ======================================================================== Request for reconsideration by ehird: [CotC: Thu, 8 Dec 2011 00:04:26 +0000 if eir ambiguous registration was ineffective] ======================================================================== Judge Pavitra's Arguments: I accept the arguments for reconsideration given by omd and Murphy. Per CFJ 3130, ehird did not register by means of the message in which e called this case. However, ehird did register at some point in the distant past. It thus remains to determine the temporal scope of the question. In the absence of any specific times named, there are three potentially reasonable interpretations of the question: 1) Do/did I register in this message? According to CFJ 3130, FALSE. 2) Do/did I register in the unspecifiedly-recent past? According to the Registrar's report, ehird's most-recent registration before this CFJ was 26 February 2009. FALSE by any sensible standard of "recent". 3) Do/did I register at any point in the past? TRUE. The rules usually invoked to resolve questions of interpretation of a text seem to have been written with the assumption that the text to be interpreted is part of a Rule. R217 is wholly without effect here, as is the first paragraph of R754(2). As far as I can tell, the possible relevant bits of Rule are 754(3) and (4). Since "do" and "did" are by no stretch of the imagination "primarily used in mathematical or legal contexts", we have to go by ordinary-language meaning. Some considerations: 1. It seems to me that the most natural phrasing of sense 3) would be "Have I [ever] registered?". 2. The inclusion of "do" may indicate the speaker trying to focus on present or near-present ("on or about right now"). 3. Contrariwise, the separate inclusion of "do" as distinct from "did" may indicate that "did" focuses specifically on the past. These considerations do not seem sufficient to decide between the various plausible interpretations of the CFJ statement. This fundamental ambiguity is, I think, confirmed by the ongoing controversy in a-d regarding how best to interpret the meaning of "did". While it is generally the responsibility of a judge to resolve ambiguity rather than to verify it, ambiguity is generally in the Rules themselves. The conditions for appropriateness of UNDETERMINED in R591 draw this distinction explicitly. So, in summary, UNDETERMINED. ========================================================================