Figure 2.

People have multiple “senses” to disambiguate the exact meaning of the object or the contract they are “talking about,” and a unique and highly developed skill set to communicate, even across national languages and jargon, with a reasonable outcome. Still, it could be argued that many misunderstandings between cultures, but even between scientists, can be traced back to either “false agreements” (we think we are talking about the same exact concept, but we are not) and “false disagreements” (we think we talk about significantly different things, while in fact we are not, and the consensus is much bigger than we experience). In science, the sources of ambiguity should ideally be kept to the absolute, unavoidable, minimum. The good news is that moving to machine readable communication of the essence of our scientific findings will also help human communication by reducing both false agreements and false disagreements (Mons et al., 2011).