Sure, but maybe the article just has bad examples. I suffer from being too logical. I'm a software person, and have many times told my friends to pretend I'm a

Sure, but maybe the article just has bad examples. I suffer from being too logical. I'm a software person, and have many times told my friends to pretend I'm a computer, simply because I just don't want to enter their world of illogical thinking. Things like "it's the same difference", for example, mean two things are the same, so there is NO difference! It's not the same difference (this implies there is one), there is NO difference. Anyway, in the end, I can see language is simply a tool, in which words and phrases take on different meaning depending on the context. To effectively communicate, it's important to see this context, which includes the _intentionality_ of the communicators. What did that person __mean__, when they said XYZ. I understand the article was about that, but I guess it gave bad examples. When the therapist asks "are you absolutely sure..", the therapist is not asking to predict the future. She is simply asking if you are 100% confident with your current knowledge, and assuming no unforeseen circumstances, that you will not harm yourself. It's actually logically sound. You can be absolutely sure, because it's qualifying your confidence in YOUR thinking. You can be absolutely sure of something and still be wrong. So the author wasn't even pedantic enough! Regardless, it was easy to simply ask what the therapist meant, and avoid whatever came after. But I guess the author of the article is also not a native English speaker, which I think is really the cause here, not that she's "academic".