Persuasion

When my wife and I take trips, we have a perpetual joke that we use to amuse ourselves on long drives.  The temperature indicator on our vehicle is fairly prominent, and while driving my wife will remark on either the unusual heat or cold outside.  I always drive and by the time I can divert my attention to the temperature, it will very often have moved up or down one degree.  The joke is that I will tell my wife that she is wrong and state the current temperature.  She now finds this behavior humorous.  I have to go through life not with approximations, but with a certain exactness because the rest of the world is so inexact.  Language itself is an approximation and while some of that ambiguity is harmless, most of it is not.  It is persuasion and it is the very essence of our society.  Politicians speak partial truths, advertisements bombard us with misleading imagery and verbiage, and our co-workers and friends use the ambiguity of language to persuade us against using our own intellect and empirical evidence as our means of discerning reality.  Words are not reality.  In this case they are black lines on a field of white.  Vigilance to the truth defined through empirical evidence is our only defense against persuasion.