N.J. Enfield > Quotes

“Reality matters because our survival depends on it. To navigate reality, as individuals, we first reduce its complexity through the interface of sensory perception. But to coordinate around reality, in concert with other people, our species’ forte is to add another interface, a further level of transformation: the interface known as language. We present reality to each other in language-delineated pieces. As the mathematician Friedrich Waismann said, language is the knife we use to cut out facts. And like any knife, as I hope this book has shown, language is both destroyer and creator. We do not coordinate around reality but around versions of reality hewn by words. The result is awkward for the scientist but convenient for the lawyer.

A problem is that we naturally take our word-given versions of the world to be reliable. And when we feel that we understand something clearly, this has a “thought-terminating” effect, as the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen puts it: “A sense of confusion is a signal that we need to think more. But when things feel clear to us, we are satisfied.” This creates a kind of cognitive vulnerability that allows people to be manipulated by any system of thought that is “seductively clear.”
― N.J. Enfield, Language vs. Reality: Why Language Is Good for Lawyers and Bad for Scientists