The space of all possible understandable statements is composed almost exclusively of references to complex & abstract ideas with a tenuous relationship to any physical reality & unclear test conditions. Almost all actual statements encountered in daily life are untestable except in an ad-hoc & ambiguous way, because their referents don’t map well to physical reality. Even statements about physical objects, because they are about classes of objects the definitions of which have unclear borders, are almost always ambiguous as to their truth even when tested. Our senses perceive objects in collaboration with our context and memory, which chunks the world into pieces whose borders have no material referent.
We’re stuck at best making ambiguous declarative statements about ambiguous concepts about which we contradict each other and ourselves, and whose very definition is a generalization from a bunch of specific referents — specifics often not shared between people, experienced differently when the specifics are shared, and remembered differently by the same person depending on context. Human beings & their communications technologies (of which language is one) are ill-suited for expressing ideas relevant to anything except language itself, whether it physically exists or not.
This should not be surprising, because sloppy heuristics form the core of human cognition, and the sloppiness of those heuristics is what makes them useful. However, it’s important to keep in mind, because via exactly those heuristic processes human beings regularly elide…