On Being Mis-Informed, Truly

Kramer:

"Of course, not all utterances respond to questions, but all should address a perceived ignorance in A that U wishes to remedy, so all utterances should be tested for informativeness against the state of A's justifiable ignorance before and after the utterance."

I liked that. It has the right Strawsonian ring to it. In his "Theoria" paper he speaks of three platitudes:

-- Relevance

-- Knowledge

-- Ignorance

Platitude of Knowledge: U should KNOW what he is uttering about.

Platitude of Ignorance: A should NOT know this or that.

---- He examines:

The King of France visited the Exhibition.

This informs, topically, about the King of France


The Exhibition was NOT visited by the King of France

'uninforms' about the exhibition.

Etc.

I'm not sure 'ignorance' and 'knowledge' need to be appealed to here. It seems that byte-by-byte is irrespective of the QUALITATIVE maxims which pertain to 'quality' of info, i.e. quality of 'info'. Bad quality 'info' is NOT info. Etc.

The idea of a _belief_, rather than 'knowledge' does not seem to weaken the thing enough.

U may BELIEVE he is informing A
while he isn't because what he believes to be true ain't.

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Similarly, a person may say the truth while Lying, because 'lying' applies as a jejune jesuit I know would say, to the 'intention to lie', not to the truth-value of what you say ("We can say Jesus lied").

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Etc.