Differences in how we interpret, think about and interact with the world are not matters of different vocabularies. On the contrary, divergent vocabularies are a matter of pre-verbal difference in interpretations and mental, emotional and practical responses.

Confusing things considerably, however, is the strange fact that adoption and use of new vocabularies can effect changes in our pre-verbal mental faculties. This how I explain our collective linguistic wrong turn, which, while not entirely fruitless has become barren. I’m turning my wheel sharply the other direction, and adopting a hard-nosed intuitivism, as painful as it is to make my language-mind admit it is not autonomous and self-contained, and that its facile answers are appealing more for being linguistically facile than for being real answers that truly account for life outside language.

I’ve been calling these strange agents intuitions.