Yes, the proposal that we should verify what a person means when we are uncertain or when we disagree applies to everyone, and in particular anything I propose I should apply to myself.
However, “always” is an overgeneralization. Next step is trivialization. I’m not saying that you intend to trivialize this principle. It’s an effect of the overgeneralizing.
“Inquiring about what people meant by each post” is recursive with no limit. Inquiring what a person means when we are uncertain or when we disagree is not recursive and ends when the other person agrees that we have understood. That’s the answer to your question
A number of your other questions can be paraphrased, I think, as What is an agreement? How do we perceive agreement? I’m setting aside the paragraphs that I drafted while thinking about those questions because in this context we can rely upon a lifetime of experience reaching agreements with others (or not) and abiding by them (or not). It’s a worthy topic for the Collective Phenomena category, and for research into collective control. Here, it’s a distraction.
Our topic is discourse dysfunction, including
I posit that disagreement, conflict, and contention always precede the discourse dysfunction that is our topic here. Controlling to correct things we disagree with establishes and strengthens conflict and is by definition disagreeable. Controlling to establish agreements is inherently more agreeable than controlling to correct things we disagree with.
When a person says something that contradicts or conflicts with what they ought to have said, a first step from disagreement to conflict is to tell them they’re wrong and correct what they said.
When a person says something that contradicts or conflicts with what they ought to have said, a first step from disagreement to agreement is to paraphrase what they said, clearly expressing the parts that you don’t like, and ask if that’s what they really intended to say.
You have provided an example. When I asked what you meant you explained that you were correcting me for naming the behaviors fight, flight, fawn and flee without saying that they are the observed side effects of controlling perceptions.
Suppose the dialog had instead gone like this:
rsmarken:
It sounds like you’re talking about the conventional categories describing observed behavioral actions, without referring to the control loops that produce those appearances.
If you had formulated your response that way, you might have noticed that actually I did refer to the control loops that produce those behavioral manifestations. If you had read the prior discussions of the model of emotion, you might have remembered the use of the phrase “fight-flight-fawn-flee control loops” and recognized this as a reference to that model. You might even have remembered where I said this a few weeks ago:
I wonder, did your control for correcting things you disagree with result in your reading only the disagreeable phrase “fight-flight-fawn-flee”, rather than the entire phrase “fight-flight-fawn-flee control loops that generate somatic arousal and emotions”? It appears that way to me.
Now let me critique a reply of my own …
… in retrospect I think I should have stopped with just the first sentence. The second sentence depends upon an assumption as to what you meant. The third was to alert you to potential side effects of the sort that have irritated people in the past. Too much in one bundle, too distracting. Better to keep it simple and direct.