Saying What You Mean

Two people argue for two hours and get nowhere. Neither has lied and neither has
misquoted. They were reading one sentence two different ways, and nothing in the
argument was built to notice.

This is a working manual for the moment a word stops being free and starts being a
rule -- in a policy, a statute, a platform's terms of service, an accusation. It sets
out seven steps for taking a contested sentence apart and nine for the argument it was
a premise in; six norms for doing either in good faith, each printed with what it will
cost the person who keeps it; five verdicts an argument can honestly end at; and four
worked audits of live material, one of which produces nothing and is printed anyway.
Seven exercises are answered in full.

It does not ask anyone to speak more precisely. Chapter 7 is the argument against
that, and it names who pays.

Set Lonnert has been exploring, teaching, and writing about computers since the early
1980s, publishing on programming, internet technologies, and web development, and spent
some ten years studying analytical philosophy. His recent Comfortication asks what human
becoming loses when a machine removes the last hard thing. Saying What You Mean puts
the two trainings together: an instrument out of the philosophy of language, for
disputes that are now settled at machine speed.