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"Anything's fine" is a denial of there being things that you don't want. But we understand, as humans/embodied systems, that this is a simply a spoken utteranc

"Anything's fine" is a denial of there being things that you don't want. But we understand, as humans/embodied systems, that this is a simply a spoken utterance whose actually meaning must be derived from personal knowledge of the speaker and/or further interaction. If you had no preference for the meal, but had things that you don't want to eat, then to be precsely correct you would not say "anything's fine". Something more like "there's nothing in particular that I want to eat". People don't speak in precisely correct ways, however, and we rely on contextual and personal knowledge to decode what they do say, very often.

JohnFen 4y ago
> People don't speak in precisely correct ways, however, and we rely on contextual and personal knowledge to decode what they do say, very often. Yes, this is the crux of the issue. The exact meaning of the words we say when we talk to each other are not usually the most information-bearing part of the communication. I think this is why when people need to communicate with precision, or over media that doesn't allow anything but language, they adopt a specialized sort of language. Every specialty has its own jargon for this exact reason.