On 2020-06-15 22:42, Brent Meeker via math-fun wrote:
I think "deceive" includes intent. "X did deceive Y, in spite of having no intention to deceive" is a contradiction in terms. It should be "X unintentionally misled Y".
My comment was only about the negation, not about "X did deceive Y". If X misled Y, but not intentionally, (or if X intended to deceive Y, but did not succeed), wouldn't it still be correct, in both cases, to say "X did not deceive Y"? But I was wrong when I said this was ambiguous, because as Dan Asimov (and you, and others pointed out), "deceive includes intent". So, not ambiguous, just that from "X did not deceive Y" we cannot infer whether X didn't succeed, or X didn't try to deceive. My mistake.
Brent
On 6/15/2020 12:12 PM, Michael Greenwald wrote:
On 2020-06-15 11:27, James Propp wrote:
Thanks, everyone, for teaching me about scoping, Empson, etc.
(Speaking of ambiguity, I just remembered that some years ago I commented on math-fun about the differing connotations of the sentences “X did not deceive Y†and “Y was not deceived by Xâ€. Not sure if that’s an example of general species of linguistic ambiguity or just an isolated oddity.) "X did not deceive Y" is ambiguous, by itself, as so many other English sentences are, because of different connotations of the word "deceive".
It could (at least) mean: "X did not <successfully> deceive Y" or "X did not <intentionally> deceive Y". In the former X could have intended to, but was unsuccessful. In the latter X may have succeeded in deceiving Y, despite having no intention to deceive.
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