Epistemic status: Idea I think is really good; likely not original

TLDR: Language is so ridiculously ambiguous and slippery that you should consider interpreting the meanings of other people's words to be a genuinely nontrivial step of considering what they have to say.

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People mistake sentences for propositions, and words for concepts. They think that the stages of responding to a text are (1) interpret the text into its objective meaning and then (2) react to that meaning. But in fact, it's crucial that there be a richer and more charitable interpretation stage than "interpret the text into its objective meaning".

Any given text, even as short as a single sentence, corresponds to lots of possible meanings. Some meanings are good matches for the text; some are okay; some aren't matches at all. The proper first step of interpretation is to survey these possible meanings and choose the one that's the most plausible, or, if you can't tell which is most plausible, to ask for clarification.

As an example of a sentence with multiple possible meanings, consider the sentence "I'm exactly six feet tall". What does "exactly six feet tall" mean? Does it mean six feet and just no inches? Six feet and you've never observably not measured up to exactly the six-foot line on the ruler? Six feet and you're completely confident it's not a micron more?

Sometimes the word "exactly" merits an interpretation like the last one, but this time, you just have to realize it can't possibly mean that. Even the first interpretation is totally reasonable. Since we usually report human heights as X-feet-Y-inches, it makes sense to use the word "exactly" to just mean that Y is zero this time. It doesn't have to mean you're not 6 feet and 1/4th of an inch tall any more than saying "I'm six foot one" has to mean you're not 6 feet, 1 and 1/4th inches tall.

As another example, consider the sentence "Some meanings are good matches for the text; some are okay; some aren't matches at all.". This sentence could be interpreted as saying that all candidate meanings of a sentence are cleanly divided into three buckets: good matches, okay matches, and non-matches. Or, it could be interpreted as illustrating the existence of a continuous spectrum of match quality by naming three points on the spectrum.

The first interpretation is a slightly better match to the actual words, but it is so unlikely that it should simply be discarded, or at worst, followed-up on for confirmation. (And if you wrote the sentence and that actually is what you wanted to say, then you should emphasize that harder and harp on it until it's clear, so people don't totally reasonably think you must mean something that sounds likelier a-priori.^[1])

This advice can be summarized as a mantra: When reading a text, don't ask what there is to argue with; ask what there is to agree with.

Bonus: more examples

• "Some foods are very healthy; some are okay; some are junk food." — Same ambiguities as in the post.
• "This book has been banned for advocating racial equality". — This could be interpreted as saying the book was banned with the official reason being "it advocates racial equality" or it could be interpreted as saying the book was banned for a bullshit reason but that the bullshit reason was unfairly invoked only in this case and the motivation for doing so was that the book advocates racial equality. Also, the word "banned" could be interpreted as "made illegal to possess" or "cleared from public libraries" or probably half a dozen other things.

1. ^{^}

   Putting the sentence into a context where you've been dividing things into discrete buckets all day might be enough. Lots of things might be enough, other than actual emphasizing or actual harping. But you have to do something to prevent the reader from falling back to the more natural spectrum interpretation.