Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5467006" data-attributes="member: 42582">This is one of those cases that makes me a bit frustrated by the whole "RAW" notion. Words don't have meaning on their own. They are used with a communicative purpose. Now the precise relationship between intention and meaning is a theoretically contested issue in philosophical linguistics, and a practically contested issue in courts of law. But that doesn't seem to be relevant here. Everyone is agreeing on what the intended meaning is. And once you have everyone agreeing on what the intended meaning is then, given that the words can bear having that construction put on them, we have worked out what the rules as written are.A parallel example: consider a mutual recognition licensing statute that says "Any licence to practise as a plumber in state X also applies in state Y". Suppose that a person has a plumbing licence issued in State X. Suppose, furthermore, that in State X a licensed plumber is also permitted to operate as a gas fitter. In State Y, on the other hand, a plubming licence is not sufficient to operate as a gas fitter - a separate licence is needed. Does the mutual recognition statute, RAW, say that State X's licensed plumbers can also practise as gas fitters in State Y?If everyone is agreed that no legislator intended mutual recognition to operate in such an expansive way, then it is clear what the mutual recognition statute says. It's meaning is Any licence to practise as a plumber in state X also applies in state Y, in so far as plumbing is concerned.If it's good enough for statutory interpretation, I think it's good enough for the D&D rulebook.EDIT: For maximum clarity, it seems to me that Boolean is obviously correct here. Although it's true that the same phrase could have been used to communicate some more expansive meaning, given that there is no one arguing that the authors actually intended such an expansive interpretation, its meaning is clear.</blockquote>

Verification