But on another level, norms of “You should take responsibility by default for how people will interpret what you say and do, even if that interpretation is completely decoupled from your intent, and even if what you said was the objectively correct truth” is also super harmful to a slice of the population and especially neurodivergent people.
I mean obviously this is simply a blurry thing. If I say something very deliberately ambiguous that could mean A and B, and then claim A when someone understands B, I may be bad at communicating or even being playing a malicious motte-and-bailey. If I say something that is decidedly A but someone manages to understand B anyway, it’s on them. Obviously where precisely the lines lie depends since language isn’t an objective thing, but there are fuzzy areas we can identify.
The funniest example of this I can always think of is one guy who wrote a review of the Pixar movie Inside Out on an Italian newspaper passionately arguing that it was a horrible piece of propaganda meant to make kids accept CIA brainwashing (“little men” controlling their brains). And I’m like, I’m all for interpreting art in different ways, Death of the Author, and such, and I still think that that is plainly ridiculous and it can only come to mind if you literally are so obsessed with it that you’re unable to interpret anything without your weird lens.
I mean obviously this is simply a blurry thing. If I say something very deliberately ambiguous that could mean A and B, and then claim A when someone understands B, I may be bad at communicating or even being playing a malicious motte-and-bailey. If I say something that is decidedly A but someone manages to understand B anyway, it’s on them. Obviously where precisely the lines lie depends since language isn’t an objective thing, but there are fuzzy areas we can identify.
The funniest example of this I can always think of is one guy who wrote a review of the Pixar movie Inside Out on an Italian newspaper passionately arguing that it was a horrible piece of propaganda meant to make kids accept CIA brainwashing (“little men” controlling their brains). And I’m like, I’m all for interpreting art in different ways, Death of the Author, and such, and I still think that that is plainly ridiculous and it can only come to mind if you literally are so obsessed with it that you’re unable to interpret anything without your weird lens.