Thread:User talk:Armondikov/Cognitive-linguistic mapping essay/reply (13)

I wouldn't say you've missed the point as merely stumbled right into it face first. The part about using fancy prose as opposed to very precise scientific-style writing would be to provoke an emotion. Indeed, that's why we read great authors rather than, say, just a list of bullet points saying "this happened, then this happened and the character's name was Aragorn, son of Arathorn" But, unless those precise connotations and connections to other implied ideas that the author meant appear in the mind of the reader, well, you could accidentally conjure up something else entirely.

But then that pertains to rational discussion as well. Merely citing the word "rational" there causes it; there are connotations of a judgment that "rational = good" and "irrational = bad", there's also a connection to the idea of reason and so on. We operate under the assumption that this is the same from person to person, but I'd say that's just an assumption and we need to gather evidence that it's true. If you disagree on something, say "Nazis were okay people", then perhaps it's because the thoughts conjured up by a set of words in the recipient are mismatched compared to the original writer. Now, that seems obvious, but it does mean that we can't go running to a dictionary for help. Someone saying "Nazis were okay people" and someone saying it's nonsense isn't going to be helped by how Merriam-Webster defines "Nazis", "okay" and "people".