Collapsing words and worlds; ontological plurality and structural reasoning

We keep learning the hard way that using the same words doesn’t necessarily mean we’re pointing at the same thing. Two people will say “truth,” “harm,” “freedom,” “safety,” “trauma,” “intelligence,” and feel aligned for a moment, but then their conversation snaps and turns hostile. When you look closely, the turn isn’t mysterious. It happens because their words were doing social work, not referential work. They created the feeling of agreement without the substance of shared reference. Their terms functioned like a flag instead of a pointer. This has become everyday life. Agreement by vocabulary, disagreement by reality.