Most people, even most unusually honest people, wander about their lives in a fog of internal distortions of reality. Repeatedly asking yourself of every sentence you say aloud to another person, “Is this statement actually and literally true?”, helps you build a skill for navigating out of your internal smog of not-quite-truths. For that is our mastery.
I think some people who read this post ought to reverse this advice. The advice I would give to those people is: if you’re constantly forcing every little claim you make through a literalism filter, you might end up multiplying disfluencies and generally raising the cost of communicating with you. Maybe put a clause limit on your sentences and just tack on a generic hedge like “or something” if you need to.
I think some people who read this post ought to reverse this advice. The advice I would give to those people is: if you’re constantly forcing every little claim you make through a literalism filter, you might end up multiplying disfluencies and generally raising the cost of communicating with you. Maybe put a clause limit on your sentences and just tack on a generic hedge like “or something” if you need to.