> many people want to believe that they are being understood
Not only that, they also want to understand. I read some computer poetry a few years ago that worked. The computer did not intend any meaning, but I found it anyway.
And of course I did. This is how language works. We assume that people (and by extension, the texts they write) follow a set of rules which structures how we engage with them in a successful manner. Paul Grice formulated this as the cooperative principle in his study of everyday language, but I believe it is the exact thing that is at play when people meet NLP:
Not only that, they also want to understand. I read some computer poetry a few years ago that worked. The computer did not intend any meaning, but I found it anyway.
And of course I did. This is how language works. We assume that people (and by extension, the texts they write) follow a set of rules which structures how we engage with them in a successful manner. Paul Grice formulated this as the cooperative principle in his study of everyday language, but I believe it is the exact thing that is at play when people meet NLP:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_principle