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pjeby comments on When Truth Isn't Enough - Less Wrong
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This is a nice way of summing up something I do with my clients, teaching them to remove the negative connotations of belief statements. For example, a statement like "life has no meaning and everything I do is pointless" can be denotationally true, but that doesn't automatically make it a bad thing.
One easy way to expose connotations in your own thinking is to ask "So what?" or "What's bad about that?" or "What's good about that?".
(The latter's a lot less useful though, since the majority of motivated reasoning is negatively-motivated. "What's bad about that" is at least 10-20 times more likely to produce a useful answer, within the context of my work anyway.)
I actually think people who say "Life has no meaning and everything I do is pointless" are actually making a deeper mistake than confusing connotations with denotations... I think they're actually making a denotational error in missing that e.g. "purpose" or "pointfulness" typically denotes ternary relationships of the form "The purpose of X to Y is Z." In other words, one must ask or tacitly understand "purpose to whom?" and "meaning to whom" before the statement makes any sense.
My favorite connotationally-heavy follow-up to this is that "My life has as many purposes as there are agents it has a purpose to."
I've been wanting to post on this under the name "Relation Projection Fallacy" for a while now, so I just did :)