esc.
[Note February 2023: this is an unedited first draft written in April 2018 while I was heavily involved with a psychopath.]
180408 01:46:29 esc.
summary: modalities attempt to mention a statement S, so to speak (by transforming it to a different statement [[M]] S), without using it. but the hidden effects of uttering S are often-roughly also caused by [[M]] S. thus S escapes its modality.
speaking in a modality [[M]] attempts to transform a statement S into an object some other type, denoted [[M]] S (which can also be taken to be a statement, but in a different modality (as in, sensory modality)).
some examples of modalities: [[M]] S may be: a string (the quotation modality; for example, "i was going to say [[']]i can't deal with this right now[[']]"); an emotion (e.g. "[[i feel like]] you are trying to hurt me"); a perception (e.g. "[[it seems to me like]] you don't want to help me"); a cognitive statement (e.g. "[[i think that]] you don't know how i feel"); a joke; a story; etc.[because this author doesn't really know what the cluster is].
the goal (as held by the generating system, i.e. the actual systems in the speaker that constructed the utterance S and promoted it to be spoken) of the utterance S is not understood, but is often adversarial wrt the hearer. for example, the goal may be to reshape the shared space := {concepts, histories, plans}. (this may present itself as wanting to be heard, understood, seen, listened to; or feeling missed, ignored, distant.)
to sheild the shared space from such assaults, a modality [[M]] is introduced (into the culture by a discourse-crafter; into the conversation by a follower of the resulting culture), with the desiderata that [[M]] S should convey the useful information that would be conveyed by S, but also that [[M]] S should not refer to and assert via any load-bearing (for the speaker, the hearer, or the speaker-hearer whole) elements of the shared space.
for example, "[[i feel like]] you are trying to not hear me" is a statement about the speaker's internal emotional (or really, world-modeling) state, which is presumed to be known to the speaker, and more importantly is disjoint from whether the hearer is in fact "trying to not hear" the speaker.
hence, the goal (as supposed and reported by the speaker's ego) of applying [[M]] is to mention some aspects of S (the aspects made salient and manipulable in the modality M) without using S (i.e. without asserting S).
the goal (as held by the generating system) of the utterance [[M]] S is the same as the goal of the utterance S.
surface-semantics interpret utterances according to the meaning of the words (including connotation, implicature, idiom, etc.); under-semantics interpret utterances according to the effect they have on the shared space and the goal held by the system in the speaker that generated the utterance.
hence the goal (as held by the generating system) of applying [[M]] is just to follow the norms, or to appear to not stake out territory in the shared space, or to disarm the hearer's systems of directly disputing S (because [[M]] S has a weaker and much more speaker-known meaning than does S, according to surface semantics) and of disputing the speaker's right to speak into the shared space and reshape it (because, according to surface semantics, usual statements in the modality [[M]] are probably-mostly disjoint from the shared-space-shared-space (i.e. the territories that are, by consensus, shared territories, and hence protected from reshaping)).
the shared space responds to [[M]] S similarly to S. (observably: if S is triggering/angering/offending, then so will [[M]] S be. this includes effects of S that are in the hearer but not caused by the speaker, e.g. a system in the hearer (maybe mistakenly) takes S (and also [[M]] S) to indicate an ill-intent in the speaker.)
thus S escapes from [[M]] S, so that the generating system can use S in its plans even if the norm is against doing so, and somewhat disarming the hearer's defenses.