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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6852452" data-attributes="member: 42582">[MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION], do you actually use the word "conjecture" in your everyday life? Or are you just relying on the thesaurus without a sense for nuance?A conjecture, or a guess, is something that is made at the end of a reasoning process - having noticed various salient factors, one then conjectures or guesses that such-and-such is the case.An assumption, or a presumption, is something that is made at the start of a reasoning process - one takes for granted, or as given, that such-and-such is the case and then extrapolates from it.A conjecture may also be an assumption, in the sense that one may conjecture that X is the case and then, relying on an assumption that X is the case, go on to make some further inference. This tells us that being a conjecture or being an assumption isn't an intrinsic property of some entertained proposition but rather is a relational property - ie it establishes the relationship of the proposition to the reasoning process in which it figures.To return to my post: when I tell you that I am conjecturing that such-and-such a thing occurred, I am not telling you that I am assuming it to be so. I am telling you that I am guessing that it is so, and giving some reasons that support my guess. The fact that my conjecture might also figure as an assumption for the purposes of some other piece of reasoning is beside the point to what I have told you.On another point: when you say "no punishment happened", did you not notice my use of inverted commas? I didn't use them by accident - I used the deliberately. I used "punish" in inverted commas because the interesting feature of the consequence is that it is adverse to the interests of the players, and not something they anticipated being in play, and appears to have been derived by the GM at least in part out of frustration that the player of the ranger had not remembered everything about the disposition of the ring and gauntlets. The GM appears to have been trying to teach the player of the ranger, and perhaps the players more generally, a lesson. Teaching someone a lesson by inflicting an adverse consequence upon them is something that is in the neighbourhood of punishment, even if not punishment in the most strict or literal sense. Hence my use of inverted commas.And a side point: how do you know that punishment must be intended as such to be such. That is a relatively strong claim in the philosophy of punishment, and while accepted by most mainstream liberal philosophers, is in my view not self-evident. For instance, there are philosophical treatments of karma, for instance, that (i) analyse karma as a type of (self-inflicted) punishment, and (ii) analyse karma as a non-intentional process. Those treatments might be wrong, but they're not obviously self-contradictory.</blockquote>

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