Can Language Be Perfect?
Details
This event will be a slightly different format I want to experiment with.
We'll meetup at a coffee shop and sit around for about 25 minutes waiting for folks to show up. Then we'll walk over to golden gate park and walk in interchangeable groups of 4-5.
The topic I want to address is, "can you think of a sentence that a good-faith actor cannot possibly misunderstand / misinterpret?" Is it possible for language to achieve perfect precision? Does abstraction in practice always leave something out? I have a couple examples in mind that I believe answer simply "Yes." Of course, you are free to disagree!
A relevant idea is "greedy reductionism" by Daniel Dennett which the wikipedia page is decent on :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greedy_reductionism
