Switching viewpoints accidentally
As a short followup to my earlier ponderings regarding what a secret is and the different ways in which one can accidentally reveal one, a short entry on how having various viewpoints can enable the speaker to see what she has done as accidental or not. If for instance, imagine the situation where Susan tells her friend Ralph all about her friend Tony’s crush on their chemistry professor (for instance), mistakenly thinking that Ralph already knew the secret (or, alternatively, thinking that the particular piece of information was not really a secret at all but common knowledge). Susan could take the perspective of Tony and say that she revealed the secret by accident, or she could close off that option and only talk about “not knowing it was a secret” or “thinking Ralph already knew.” On the other hand, Ralph is likely to see this as accidentally letting the cat out of the bag. He could lament, Susan accidentally blabbed by secret to Ralph, or Susan accidentally told Ralph all about my crush on the teacher. (However, the sequence Susan told Ralph that I liked our chem professor. But it was an accident seems a little odd, only because it leaves wide open the possibility that the actual telling was accidental, i.e., a slip of the tongue, rather than the revelation per se being accidental).
I’m still finding it very hard thinking about what an accident exactly is, and how to talk about what it means to reveal a secret by telling someone exactly the content of that secret, in terms of intentionality and assumptions about interlocutor knowledge.
Up next: a little discussion on Richard Hudson’s article in a 2004 issue of Journal of Linguistics on the fields of education and linguistics.
Perhaps I’m oversimplifying, but could an “accident” just be an action that produces unintended consequences? It seems to make more sense to talk in terms of unintended consequences instead of unintended action. This would also cover cases where the consequences aren’t bad (e.g., I found $10 under my stove, quite by accident.)
Hmm, that seems like a cool thought, but what do you mean by “unintended consequences”? I mean, say I’m trying to fix someone’s complicated machine with lots of widgets, switches, and cogs, and accidentally push some lever (I trip and fall on it). Much to my surprise, this fixes the machine. Since there was no intention in the action, it seems hard to categorize the consequences as intended or not. That is, consequences being unintended seems to imply the existence of a particular intended (set of) consequence(s).
I mean, certainly I intend to fix the machine, but I didn’t intend to fix it -in that particular way-. Maybe you could say an accident is something that produces unpredicted consequences. Then to do something accidentally would be to do something such that [there is a result, and] the result is something not expected to have happened (given the action). Of course, this might mean that you could -try- to do something accidentally, which doesn’t seem like it should happen.