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Seeing the phrase "Tower of Babel" again earlier today had me remembering a favorite quote: "the words are mine; the meaning is you", which suggests - if not insists - our sum total of beliefs about reality and ourselves so utterly colors/filters/distorts the meaning of words that we essentially have little or no chance of understanding each other via the medium of words.
That doesn't mean we can't *believe* such isn't the case, of course, because who doesn't want to believe we're understanding each other because we use the same words. But it's unlikely that believing such actually makes it so save in the aforementioned cocoon of personal belief(s) about reality and self therein, which of course isn't the same as so-called consensual reality.
Of course, that's bad news for those of us that come to places like this in hope of reality-modeling alignment....
I suspect the situation improves in narrowly defined realities, e.g. a programming language. But even then, it's not hard to find significant disagreement about the meaning of, say, documentation verbiage.
But I would love the above to be proven incorrect.
Not that such could possibly be accomplished in words, of course.... ;-)
2023-10-31 · 4 days ago · 👍 Minko_Ikana
Not even in a program. Let's say you see some code and it looks odd. Is it a bug? I mean, the behaviour is strange maybe the author meant to do the other thing... Now two people can agree on execution but not on intention. A fun case of this was with CSS padding. The spec interpreted it one way, and most browsers implemented the spec, but IE6 interpreted it another (perhaps intuitive but incorrect to the spec) way. Oops.
2023-11-01 · 3 days ago
@gyaradong Yep.. been there.
In typical conversation, a lot of the confusion seems rooted in the incessant use of what I keep trying to tell my wife are "useless words", because their meaning presupposes and, thus, depends almost entirely upon the speaker's specific physical context (bodily location, body/eyes height, head orientation, etc.) that listeners couldn't possibly have since only one body can occupy said context at a given time: e.g. 'this', 'that', 'here', or 'there' (sometimes accompanied by equally useless pointing).
Then there are words with duplicate meanings.
Then there are different words that sound the same even though spelled differently (e.g. there/their/they're).
And then there's the private conceptual context mentioned in previous posts.
Of course, that fuzziness can be glorious in writing. Just yesterday I was rehearsing Lennon's "The Ballad of John and Yoko", and (in my opinion) a phenomenal example of that is at the end of this verse:
Drove from Paris to the Amsterdam Hilton Talking in our beds for a week The news people said, "Say what you doing in bed?" I said, "We're only trying to get us some peace"
where I've long thought he was being intensely clever on the word 'peace' given how a bed is an ideal place to "get us some PIECE"... right?
Anyway....