Words do not have an unambiguous meaning. The meaning of a group of words is in the mind of the speaker and the mind of the listener. Each are coming from a different context and different experiences with those words. This leaves an interpretation gap. This gap may be insignificant when speaking about factual things or when speaker and listener have similar experience, beliefs or culture. However the gap may be significant enough to make the communication meaningless or even harmful if the parties are very different, antagonistic or partisan. This is why words are so unsuitable and even harmful for political discourse.

As an example, take a word like “unfairness”, an important concept in political discussions. The word, like most words is very generic. The word can be used in many situations of unfairness. The mind could not cope with a different variation of the word for all the situations it could apply to. Instead we add more words to make it specific but each of these words has their own meaning gap, thereby compounding the meaning gap.

We now have an important addition to our brain, the smartphone we all carry in our pocket. We can use this to represent our thoughts in a more meaningful way than words and then communicate those thoughts without the meaning gap to everyone else.This new language which I call BPS (BluePrint Speak) does not exist today. It will have to evolve with many people using it in a trial and error process until until we have something suitable for political debate.

It is blueprint like because on the smartphone we can make it visual which we can’t do with words. We can also make it unambiguous by adding enough detail layers so the listener can drill down and not have to make their own assumptions about what was meant.

To imagine how this might work so we could get started, if we used the word “unfairness” in a text, we could click on it to open up a large form to be filled out to provide all the needed details. An analysis of the concept would show the key components and attributes that are needed.

The meaning gap presents a big problem for our expectations that our smartphones will soon understand our words. What context and experience will the computer use to fix the meaning of the words it receive? A BPS language would put the responsibility for detail on the speaker, not the listener. We would have a common language that both we and our smartphone could understand.