Communication is about context
Sometimes the context is so obvious that the frame is nearly invisible, sometimes the context is so subtle that indications of obvious significance can only be detected after much study.
Language and meaning involve sharing of contexts.
This is obvious, what is less obvious is the way that communication implicates a context one might call, A Theory of Mind
What does this mean? Well a lot of it is hidden in what we call common sense, or folk psychology. You know what I mean because I'm behaving conventionally in my choice of words, and saying stuff that makes sense.
When we use language conventionally, we talk about things that are happening and what people are thinking. When we talk about things that matter we wonder what others think. We think about what other people are thinking, all the time.
It’s a common enough usage of language, and quite comprehensible. Which makes it all the more peculiar that for a long time science had a weird rule that said that unempirical terms like intention and purpose, not to mention perception and comprehension were "metaphysical nonsense".
Science has come a long way since the logical positivists held sway. Its not that they were wrong, the problem was they couldn’t be right. The original proof that they were wrong was at hand for most of the 20th century, in the interference pattern between the works of Wittgenstein and Gödel,
As recently as the middle of the last century, back when Chomsky was doing his seminal work in deep structures, psychology was firmly stuck with Pavlovian Reflexes and Skinner Boxes and vigorously opposed adopting any working theory of mind. Stimulus Response Theory just cant handle task of explaining what an artist does. Into this context, Modern Linguistics was born.
