There's a related problem; Humans have a tendency to once they have terms for something take for granted that something that at a glance seem to make rough syntactic sense actually has semantics behind it. A lot of theology and the bad ends of philosophy have this problem. Even math has run into this issue. Until limits were defined rigorously in the mid 19th century there was disagreement over what the limit of 1 -1 + 1 -1 +1 -1 +1... was. Is it is 1 because one can group it as 1 + (-1 +1) + (-1+1)... or maybe it is zero since one can write it as (1-1) + (1-1) + (1-1)...? This did however lead to good math and other notions of limits including the entire area of what would later be called Tauberian theorems.
There's a related problem; Humans have a tendency to once they have terms for something take for granted that something that looks at a glance to make rough syntactic sense that it actually has semantics behind it.
This sentence is so convoluted that at first I thought it was some kind of meta joke.
[I'd put this in an open thread, but those don’t seem to happen these days, and while this is a quote it isn't a Rationality Quote.]
— Geoffrey K. Pullum, Language Log, “Never fails: semantic over-achievers”, December 1, 2011
This seems like it might lead to something interesting to say about the design of minds and the usefulness of generalization/abstraction, or perhaps just a good sound bite.