think, it is kind of hard to read your posts, and I can understand the kind of responses your getting.
Language will always be a difficulty in epistemology, because whatever words we agree upon, the agreement is made within language, which carries the original difficulty.
This was illustrated by Deanna Troi and Picard when she showed him her tea cup. How does the gesture of showing a cup relate to the word she spoke? Does the word mean cup, or liquid, or hot, or brown, or something else?
This perpetuates through sentences also, and 'clarification' doesn't necessarily improve communication, only consolidate the structures in your mind. The sentences I write may seem meaningful and coherent to you, but you may infact be forming a completely different structure in your own mind, from what I intended, depending upon how we each interpret the data.
From a young age I've had a heightened awareness that people can and do fail to communicate effectively by not being paying enough attention to what is going on in the mind of their audience. My father's probably the worst at that, assuming that everyone else sees the world, and interprets language, how he does. So to him, the sentences he speaks are always crystal clear in meaning, and if somebody doesn't understand him or misinterprets, then obviously it is their fault, not his.
It through exposure to conversations like this that I am well aware of the limitations of language -- that words relate to internal structures, and may trigger different internal structures than intended when those words are communicated to others. And since we're never
fully aware of what's going on in the minds of our audience, we can never hope to communicate
perfectly.
So all this I wrote above means one thing to me, but it might mean something different to another, and if they try and explain their thoughts to me, the reverse happens, so we're mutually with different mental structures, but calling them the same thing.
One nice example of this I think, is what 'yellow' looks like.
Now I see yellow one way, and I can use that word to describe the colour of the sun and sunflowers, and you can use the word the same for the sun and sunflowers, yet we may each see yellow completely differently. We only have the word from being shown things like the sun and sunflowers.
I might see yellow, how you see what I call blue, but you'd call that internal image 'yellow'. But if you gave me your visual cortex, I would then say the sun was blue.
It's a good example... for me, anyway
