Communication and understanding

This article consists of two sections: in the first one, I discuss one of the most prevalent lay myths in the Western world with respect to communication and understanding, namely, the view that meaning resides in words and that it is transmitted from one language user to another in a conduit, as it were. In the second section, I refer to my own research illustrating the prevalence of the myth in question in a variety of domains, for instance, in politics and academia. I also refer briefly to my own empirical studies on the role that communicational and understanding problems play, in the opinion of the lay language user, in a variety of social contexts.