#4, from Stephen Neal’s Pragmatism and Binding:

I’m increasingly convinced that the point of semantics is to prove that we have no idea what anyone else means by anything. Communication seems to be just coincidental and we’ve only convinced ourselves that it’s real. This is why we have art. What need would there be for art if we could actually understand each other? Art is like desperately trying to claw our way into someone else’s being. It’s like a Gricean implicature, letting us know that we fail to connect on a regular basis. Or maybe I’m just not understanding what the author is saying here…