Language can only ever approximate reality and that’s Fine Actually. The point of maps is to have a simplified representation of the territory you can use for navigation (or avoiding water mains as you dig, or assessing potential weather conditions, or deciding which apartment to rent—and maps for different purposes include or leave out different features of the territory depending on which matter to the task at hand); including all the detail would mean the details that actually matter for our goals are lost in the noise (not to mention requiring, in the limit, a map which is an identical copy of the territory and therefore intractably large). So too is language a compression of reality in order to better communicate that subset of its features which matter to the task at hand; it’s that very compression which lets us choose which part of the territory we point to.
Language can only ever approximate reality and that’s Fine Actually. The point of maps is to have a simplified representation of the territory you can use for navigation (or avoiding water mains as you dig, or assessing potential weather conditions, or deciding which apartment to rent—and maps for different purposes include or leave out different features of the territory depending on which matter to the task at hand); including all the detail would mean the details that actually matter for our goals are lost in the noise (not to mention requiring, in the limit, a map which is an identical copy of the territory and therefore intractably large). So too is language a compression of reality in order to better communicate that subset of its features which matter to the task at hand; it’s that very compression which lets us choose which part of the territory we point to.