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."
I truly don't see the deception. "Love is just a word" = "love is like those other things that are "just words", i.e. empty verbiage".
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Except, again, when you deal with deepities, people often refuse to agree with an unpacked version of a sentence that they agree with. So I think your claim here is false; it isn't just some sort of obvious shorthand everyone understands.
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Not everybody understands it as the same thing. The communication fidelity is poor. That's what cluster thinking gets you; it doesn't have the mechanisms (like one word = defined meanings) that ensure reliable transmission. Similar people get similar impressions though.
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