Fritz Iversen

Thank you for this great and well thought article on a topic of "kindness" that interests me in connection with the big puzzle: "how do people understand what people are meaning with their words?" In my observation, the process of understanding is not yet fully understood, except where understanding takes place without language.

In all the situations of ambiguity you describe, we again encounter the problem of language, that even clear and unambiguous sentences can be understood differently. And this is even possible in situations in which the context is shared by the speaker and the listener. In fact, even apparent sentences can be particularly difficult to understand if it remains unclear why they are... (read more)

I think you are on the right track.

The problem is, "specifity" has to be handled in a really specific way and the intention has to be the desire to get from the realm of unclear arguments to clear insight.

If you see discussions as a chess game, you're already sending your brain in the wrong direction, to the goal of "winning" the conversation, which is something fundamentally different than the goal of clarity.

Just as specificity remains abstract here and is therefore misunderstood, one would have to ask: What exactly is specificity supposed to be?

Linguistics would help here. For the problem that is negotiated grows out of the deficiencies of language, namely that language... (read 373 more words →)