Just-language, without any irl stuff, probably doesn’t really achieve communication. Because the words don’t carry their definition. And they definitely don’t carry any real experience-stuff (sight, sound etc) either.
It’s just assumed that you’re connecting the word to the definition/experience, in your head, in a way that makes communication happen.
And that’s a big assumption. It might be only 80% congruent. Or 50%. Or 5%. We could be a race of Chinese boxes for all we know.
IRL there is a verification to the process. If I order a pizza and I get a pizza then that’s a pretty good sign that the communication is working.
But on the Internet, where it’s just-language? Forget it. Howling solipsists all the way down.
You might be interested in reading about the knowledge argument aka Mary’s Room, a thought experiment about knowledge. See also: qualia
Basically this: Mary is a brilliant scientist who spends all day every day in her room. She has no color of any kind in her room. But, being a brilliant scientist, she has learned everything there is to know about color. She knows about frequencies and wavelengths, she knows all about the eye and the brain and how they interpret light to form the sensation of color. She has studied art from all of human history and knows how artists use color and understand all of their cultural associations.
But she has never seen red herself. So in all of her learning, does she really understand what red is? She’s missing the qualia, the subjective experience of a thing. No amount of language and communication can bridge that gap.
In our language there’s a missing providence-thing. Like, when somebody mentions “red” there’s no thing telling us if they mean “red gleaned from a book” or “red gleaned from seeing”. They’re treated the same.
In fact, language stuff is generally treated as equivalent to experience stuff.
Madness, right?
I’m not sure “madness” is the term I’d use but I see what you’re getting at. Communication is a weird thing if you think about it long enough, the idea of trying to recreate a subjective experience in someone else’s mind.
In common communication the shared fantasy is treated as equivalent to experience.
Not in science though. Science (and science-like things) is an exception there. Science has the providence-thing (you could say that it explicitly acknowledges that language isn’t enough). I’d say that’s the source of its power.
I understand the point of the story but if she’s studied art from all of human history she’s seen quite a bit of color.