I think you'd do well to take a college communications class. You'd get exposed to diagrams like this that examine and explain what communication is, and how language works to facilitate communication:
this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2026
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There's a typo in the diagram. Allthough it doesn't hamper the way it communicates its message.
I think Ferdinand de Saussure’s intuition is closer to the truth than the idea that words have a 1:1 congruence to objective reality, or that they’re truly defined by their dictionary “definitions”. Rather, all the words in a language mutually define each other via their correlations in usage, and the resulting network of correlations forms a unified structure we then match to the similar structure we recognize in reality.
Because this structure is entirely contained within the usage patterns of the language itself, it doesn’t need to be communicated via any extra-linguistic channel.
That we all glean the same meaning from the "usage patterns" is close enough. And that says nothing about referring to real experiences.
I suspect that rigorous language : science, engineering etc, is more valid and validatable. But the casual stuff not so much. And set foot into esoteric subjects and the howling really begins..
dunno what you mean
OP doesn't either ...
From their posts they just learned about Plato's cave, or more likely just saw The Matrix.
But they keep dancing around the cave allegory and not really understanding it.
You might be interested in reading about the knowledge argument aka Mary's Room, a thought experiment about knowledge. See also: qualia
Basically this: Mary is a brilliant scientist who spends all day every day in her room. She has no color of any kind in her room. But, being a brilliant scientist, she has learned everything there is to know about color. She knows about frequencies and wavelengths, she knows all about the eye and the brain and how they interpret light to form the sensation of color. She has studied art from all of human history and knows how artists use color and understand all of their cultural associations.
But she has never seen red herself. So in all of her learning, does she really understand what red is? She's missing the qualia, the subjective experience of a thing. No amount of language and communication can bridge that gap.
In our language there's a missing providence-thing. Like, when somebody mentions "red" there's no thing telling us if they mean "red gleaned from a book" or "red gleaned from seeing". They're treated the same.
In fact, language stuff is generally treated as equivalent to experience stuff.
Madness, right?
I'm not sure "madness" is the term I'd use but I see what you're getting at. Communication is a weird thing if you think about it long enough, the idea of trying to recreate a subjective experience in someone else's mind.
In common communication the shared fantasy is treated as equivalent to experience.
Not in science though. Science (and science-like things) is an exception there. Science has the providence-thing (you could say that it explicitly acknowledges that language isn't enough). I'd say that's the source of its power.
I understand the point of the story but if she's studied art from all of human history she's seen quite a bit of color.
Language is inherently imprecise, I would say actually that it depends on that imprecision as 1:1 communication of an idea is impossible. It certainly couldn't be any more precise than our already incorrect experience of reality. Sometimes I think its pretty incredible that our emotional and physical experiences are similar enough at all for communication to be possible.
All forms of communication have advantages and disadvantages. I'm old enough to still have written actual letters to lovers and friends. There's something to be said for collecting your thoughts - sometimes for days - and putting them on paper in concentrated form.
All in all I think the dangers of misunderstanding each other are just as big as with any other form.
Unless you had some other type of effectiveness in mind.
The ability to refer directly to a shared experience definitely sets that form of communication above other types. Definitely moves it in the direction opposite solipsistic howling. Wouldn't you agree?
You asked a question with something specific in mind, but that isn't actually reflected in the question. Well, in the very last sentence it is.
I answered a different aspect of the question.
Effective communication?
Ignoring my question reflects more on the answerer than the process, I'd say.
I didn't ignore it though. I answered - from my pov.
This is the only bit that hints at the direction you wanted this to go - and you answered it yourself:
But on the Internet, where it’s just-language? Forget it. Howling solipsists all the way down.
I refer to the "The ability to refer directly to a shared experience..." thing.
It's shit, but it's the best we've got.
Good enough, apparently.
If it's good enough, and it's all howling solipsists, then that suggests that people are very similar. Because that's how talking to yourself and talking to other people overlaps.
We're similar enough.
The similarity and the communication-success are directly proportional. I mean, it follows. So you get a kind of 90% social solipsism. Is that the same as an echo chamber? A 90% echo chamber?
Linguistic communication is shown to be effective enough to coordinate action of individuals and groups of various size, not just repeat sounds to each other as a chattering of animals. This would indicate that the communication is more than just an echo chamber of call and response, even if the individuals don't use their words in perfect alignment.
Well it implies that we all carry identical interpreters. That's where 99% of the conversation comes from. Also, that shared 99% is implicitly chorussed by everybody in the conversation.
Chomsky was big on the idea that we innately have a certain bunch of ideas wired into our minds at birth, and then we learn words that are connected with some of those ideas, and other words are related to the initial words. One of his examples iirc was the word "climb" being connected to an innate concept. We can imagine all kinds of species possessing this concept even without having language. Humans later evolved a language faculty that allowed associating words with the concept and the sensations of climbing. IDK how current that idea is among linguists nowadays.
I would say LLM's trained on internet text manage to communicate verbally to some extent, despite not having such biological priors. Their style ranges from annoying to sometimes hilariously wrong, but plenty of humans are the same way.