I think part of the story is that language is compositional. If someone utters the words “maroon hexagon”, you can make a large update in favor of a specific hypothesis even if you haven’t previously seen a maroon hexagon, or heard those words together, or judged there to be anything special about that hypothesis. “Maroon” has been sufficiently linked to a specific narrow range of colors, and “hexagon” to a specific shape, so you get to put those inferences together without needing additional coordination with the speaker.
This seems related to the denotation/connotation distinction, where compositional inferences are (typically?) denotations. Although the distinction seems kind of fuzzy, as it seems that connotations can (gradually?) become denotations over time, e.g. “goodbye” to mean that a departure is imminent, or an image of a red octagon to mean “stop” (although I’d say that the words “red octagon” still only have the connotation of “stop”). And “We should get together more often” is interesting because the inferences you can draw from it aren’t that related to the inferences you typically draw from the phrases “get together” and “more often”.
I think part of the story is that language is compositional. If someone utters the words “maroon hexagon”, you can make a large update in favor of a specific hypothesis even if you haven’t previously seen a maroon hexagon, or heard those words together, or judged there to be anything special about that hypothesis. “Maroon” has been sufficiently linked to a specific narrow range of colors, and “hexagon” to a specific shape, so you get to put those inferences together without needing additional coordination with the speaker.
This seems related to the denotation/connotation distinction, where compositional inferences are (typically?) denotations. Although the distinction seems kind of fuzzy, as it seems that connotations can (gradually?) become denotations over time, e.g. “goodbye” to mean that a departure is imminent, or an image of a red octagon to mean “stop” (although I’d say that the words “red octagon” still only have the connotation of “stop”). And “We should get together more often” is interesting because the inferences you can draw from it aren’t that related to the inferences you typically draw from the phrases “get together” and “more often”.