It is of course possible to construct fictitious contexts in which it is hard to tell what symbols mean. That doesn't mean that those symbols don't have meaning.
It's trivial to define a mapping from the symbolic to the rhetorical. The reverse isn't trivial, but even if it were trivial, we'd still prefer the symbolic.
When there's a potential ambiguity and one meaning is sensical and the other nonsensical, that's not actually an ambiguity.
Saying that this is ambiguous is paramount to making the assumption that the author does not know the difference, and then trying to twist the meanings to prove your point. That's unnecessarily tendentious.
You are right, if you add quotes to the word 'understood' in the second sentence. So, it is an issue of what understanding in the context of humans, in what way this is different from what understanding in the context of computers/symbolic language is.
Natural languages are ambiguous indeed. But it does not mean that you can pick any interpretation you like and "demonstrate" anything you want from it.
I won't address the rest, it makes no sense to me.
The difference, and the problem, is the word "clever." If you leave it out, and just plainly state "I can't figure out why x doesn't work," it's less likely to be misunderstood, and it's an accurate representation of your current mental state.
The symbols above? They're English sentences, and they're perfectly clear in context. You're making a category error by trying to treat them as logical propositions, and it's leading you to waste your time on pedantry.
Yep, there are multiple ways to interpret it, but that's the problem, particularly with written text. When spoken the word "just" and the tone of the rest of the sentence convey significant meaning that is lost when reading it.
What I'm saying is that at no point was I confused about what they were trying to communicate, so as far as I'm concerned it makes no difference outside of just being pedantic.
I'm sorry, I would like to help but I can't figure out where you're getting tripped up since (to me) the various interpretations don't seem to differ much in meaning beyond the linguistic/semantic fuzziness that is common in informal communication.
> The royal road to clarifying subtle differences in language, however, is etymology
No, it's not. Etymology tells you where a word came from, not what it means (either in denotation or connotation) in current usage. It will often be completely misleading in trying to unpack subtle differences in meaning.
We're not dealing in language, formal symbols exist to remove the ambiguity of language.
Plain and simple, the symbols used don't mean what the poster thinks they mean.
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