Tag: elephants

As the publication date of A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis (LIH) draws nearer, I feel it’s a good time to promote it (obviously) and to introduce some of the problems it uncovers – including common misperceptions I’ve already heard. Through this feedback, I now understand some of the underlying structural limitations that I hadn’t considered, but this only strengthens my position. As I state at the start of the book, the LIH isn’t a cast-in-stone artefact. Other discoveries will inevitably be made. For now, consider it a way to think about the deficiencies of language, around which remediation strategies can be developed.

Let’s clear the undergrowth first. The Language Insufficiency Hypothesis is not concerned with everyday ambiguity, garden-variety polysemy, or the sort of misunderstandings that vanish the moment someone bothers to supply five seconds of context. That terrain is already well-mapped, thoroughly fenced, and frankly dull.

Take the classic sort of example wheeled out whenever someone wants to sound clever without doing much work:

‘I made a 30-foot basket’.

If you’re a basketweaver, you picture an absurdly large basket and quietly question the maker’s life choices. If you’re watching basketball, you hear ‘score’. If you’re anywhere near the context in which the sentence was uttered, the meaning is obvious. If it isn’t, the repair cost is trivial. Add context, move on, live your life.

Language did not fail here. It merely waited for its coat. This is not the sort of thing the LIH loses sleep over.

The Groucho Marx Defence, or: Syntax Is Not the Problem

Logicians and armchair philosophers love to reach for jokes like Groucho Marx’s immortal line:

‘I shot an elephant in my pyjamas. Why it was wearing my pyjamas, I’ll never know’.

Yes, very funny. Yes, the sentence allows for a syntactic misreading. No, nobody actually believes the elephant was lounging about in striped silk. The humour works precisely because the “wrong” parse is momentarily entertained and instantly rejected.

Again, language is not insufficient here. It’s mischievous. There’s a difference.

If the LIH were worried about this sort of thing, its ambitions would be indistinguishable from an undergraduate logic textbook with better branding.

Banks, Rivers, and the Myth of Constant Confusion

Likewise, when someone in a city says, ‘I went to the bank’, no sane listener imagines them strolling along a riverbank, unless they are already knee-deep in pastoral fantasy or French tourism brochures. Context does the heavy lifting. It almost always does.

This is not a crisis of meaning. This is language functioning exactly as advertised.

Where the Trouble Actually Starts: Contestables

The LIH begins where these tidy examples stop being helpful. It concerns itself with Contestables: terms like truth, freedom, justice, fairness, harm, equality. Words that look stable, behave politely in sentences, and then detonate the moment you ask two people what they actually mean by them. These are not ambiguous in the casual sense. They are structurally contested.

In political, moral, and cultural contexts, different groups use the same word to gesture at fundamentally incompatible conceptual frameworks, all while assuming a shared understanding that does not exist. The conversation proceeds as if there were common ground, when in fact there is only overlap in spelling.

That’s why attempts to ‘define’ these terms so often collapse into accusation:

That’s not what freedom means.
That’s not real justice.
You’re redefining truth.

No, the definitions were never shared in the first place. The disagreement was smuggled in with the noun.

‘Just Ignore the Word’ Is Not a Rescue

A common response at this point is to suggest that we simply bypass the troublesome term and discuss the concrete features each party associates with it. Fine. Sensible. Often productive. But notice what this manoeuvre concedes. It does not save the term. It abandons it.

If meaningful discussion can only proceed once the word is set aside and replaced with a list of clarifications, constraints, examples, and exclusions, then the word has already failed at its primary job: conveying shared meaning. This is precisely the point the LIH is making.

The insufficiency is not that language is vague, or flexible, or context-sensitive. It’s that beyond a certain level of conceptual complexity, language becomes a confidence trick. It gives us the feeling of agreement without the substance, the appearance of communication without the transaction.

At that point, words don’t merely underperform. They mislead.