[zopa]

Can't speak for what the person you're replying to meant (lol), but no, of course it's not nearly that stark. There's a continuum. Concrete everyday topic that comes up frequently? Everyone's going to know what they mean by what they say there. But we've all been in business meetings where people were just putting words together in a plausible way; we've probably all been the people speaking at those meetings.

The fact that it's possible to say things that make no sense, without knowing that they make no sense, proves the point. You or I can come up with a phrase like "the barber of Seville shaves all the people who do not shave themselves," and we can come up with paradoxical phrases without realizing that they are nonsensical. Neither of those would be possible if there were always a strict, one-to-one relationship between speech utterances and facts about the world.

Sometimes we have a specific idea of what we mean by what we say, sometimes we're just putting words together, often it's somewhere in between.

[ben_w]

> and we can come up with paradoxical phrases without realizing that they are nonsensical

Sometimes we have difficulty even noticing that a phrase is paradoxical even when pointed out. "More people have been to Berlin than I have."