Something every educated person should internalize is that a large fraction of statements by authority figures have no information content at all, but only seem like they must be important because ambiguous phrasing creates a false impression of profundity.
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One common trick is the use of the verb "to be" in ways that conceal meaning. If you rephrase a statement that contains the word "is" not to use it, and the resulting statement turns out trivial or meaningless, you might be seeing an instance of the problem.
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Another trick is to disambiguate ambiguously used pronouns; "we" is commonly abused, and trying to replace it with the actual group that is meant can profoundly clarify the underlying meaning or lack of meaning in a statement.
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Going through transcripts of political speeches, especially of politicians you like, and rewriting them to eliminate the verb "to be", to eliminate all the "we"s, etc., often renders most of a speech entirely and obviously meaningless. (The exercise can be initially shocking.)
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Daniel Dennett has written convincingly about a phenomenon that he calls the "deepity", the use of a phrase that is trivial when read one way and meaningless or false when read another, to create an illusion of profundity. Example deepity: "Love is just a word."
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(Read one way, it's trivial, as "Love" is indeed a word. Read another way, it seems to indicate that love isn't a real phenomenon, which is clearly false, but the fact that it is true when read in the other way can lead to accidental belief that the other reading is meaningful.)
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Replying to @perrymetzger
hm. If someone said "Love is just a word" I would assume he meant "love is, in some way, shallow or not truly real". That's a legitimate opinion someone might have, and you'd have to let them talk more to know why they hold it.
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Replying to @s_r_constantin
Then perhaps they should say "love isn't truly a real thing; here's my reasoning about why", and not "love is just a word", which is a linguistic trap.
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Replying to @perrymetzger
This just doesn't seem true to the way people use language! Usually they don't know why exactly they think a thing, or even what exactly they think. But they have an experience (like, maybe love sucked for them) and they got an impression (like, maybe love is overrated), and
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Replying to @s_r_constantin @perrymetzger
they want to convey that impression of life to you and make you have *roughly* that sense of things as well. "Love is just a word" seems like a perfectly good way to gesture in a direction like that. It's not an argument. But it's only very rarely that arguments are possible.
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If I could only speak about things I knew for sure, I wouldn't be able to communicate about *most* things in my life! and already I can't communicate about most things, because almost everyone I know is as much of a prosy fact-obsessed stinker as you. :p
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Replying to @s_r_constantin
That's not true. You can communicate about things that you don't understand well in a way that conveys that without resort to linguistic trickery. You don't lose the ability to communicate merely by trying to avoid phrases that only seem to convey meaning.
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