The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in Language

In the previous post I used the common analogy of physical space to talk about the internet. I then used the same analogy to talk about language, explaining that words would be analogous to individual physical addresses and we can tell somebody to meet us somewhere and we both understand. Similarly, we can say a word and we know what meaning is being conveyed without taking the mental journey together. Words are landmarks, mental checkpoints we can reference to relate a concept in the real world.

Words mean things and when we chain them together they have even further specific meanings. If we asked somebody to meet us on the corner of 2 streets, we know where to go, but are they going to be exactly on the corner? More on one side or another? How do we know what "on the corner" means? When we say it, we're confident that the other person has understood, and the other person is confident that they understood what you meant without any question.

Words are the same way. When we say something, the meaning is basically understood. We're confident that the word navigates people to the objective meaning in their brain, an image of what it means. But words can be misunderstood, and when there's a misunderstanding, our natural explanation is to use more words to further explain the meaning in our head. Trying to explain in minute detail everything that we mean so that others understand exactly what we mean would be exhausting. Getting the exact meaning we have in our head to the other person makes language less usable. We created language to communicate more easily, but this is almost paradoxical.

This is where the Uncertainty Principle comes in. Measuring a particle's exact location and its momentum means giving up one for the other. In the same way, language can be either precise or usable, but not fully both. There is a medium that we settle on which is what we use now, but think about trying to make your language more precise - it makes it less usable, and vice versa. Trying to convey exactly 100% of what you mean would be incredibly time consuming and difficult, which means that every time you're trying to illustrate that concept again, you have to do the same thing. This makes it highly unusable. If language was highly usable, this would mean you could convey much more meaning with fewer words. But using very few words would make your speech highly imprecise (watch that one intro to The Office where Kevin starts using less words) People would be unsure of what you're trying to say and the range of what people could interpret your speech as would vary wildly.