On Sun, May 26, 2019 at 4:41 PM James Cook <jc...@cs.berkeley.edu> wrote:
> For (a): I think it depends what "gamestate" means. It's never really
> defined. But personally I was assuming the gamestate covers all the
> facts invented by the rules, and not realities, e.g. what happened in
> the past. But I'm not sure about this. Anyway, my assumption would
> imply (a) is false.
I searched the archives a bit, and the situation seems to be more
complex than I remembered.
In CFJ 3337, G. ruled that statements about the past *could* be
ratified, but that it wasn't in that particular case because the scope
of what was actually ratified was limited by self-ratification:
> I agree with scshunt that history CAN be subject to ratification, but
> *not* that it is subject to self-ratification. That is, the self-
> ratification of a report fact ("as of this date, scshunt was a player")
> does not ratify the state of play the instant before that report was
> made. In particular, R2139 explicitly only governs the set of players
> at a particular instant (the instant of the report), and R2138 only
> governs the older of each office at a particular instant. The strict
> wording of *exactly* what is self-ratified (state) precludes any
> ratification of when or how that state came to be, historically.
>
> An explicit ratification process could do so, by (e.g. without
> objection) ratifying that the statement in question was true at an
> earlier date from the report.
https://faculty.washington.edu/kerim/nomic/cases/?3337
...However, in retrospect, I'm not sure that judgement actually makes
sense. Rule 1551 states (and stated at the time):
When a public document is ratified, rules to the contrary
notwithstanding, the gamestate is modified to what it would be if,
at the time the ratified document was published, the gamestate had
been minimally modified to make the ratified document as true and
accurate as possible; [...]
The self-ratifying statements were about the current state at the time
they were published, but when they were ratified, the gamestate was
set to "what it would be" if publishing them had changed things to
make them true. If the gamestate includes the past, "what it would
be" necessarily includes the fact that they were true when they were
published (or at least immediately afterward).
Not sure what to take away from that. I don't see any more recent
CFJs about the issue.
