v21’s avatarv21’s Twitter Archive—№ 57,125

  1. …in reply to @supermattachine
    @supermattachine serious answer: the place I would go to for this the linguistics subfield of pragmatics, namely Grice's maxims, and implicatures.
    1. …in reply to @v21
      @supermattachine basically, in conversations, people assume answers will be relevant (& truthful, & other things). so when something is not relevant, you do the gymnastics necessary to convert it into something relevant, and then there's your meaning, shared between participants.
      1. …in reply to @v21
        @supermattachine why do people do that is a hard question, and answering it probably would take you into the murky world of evolutionary psychology.