CONCEPT
Expression Is Thought
Murray's claim — shared with linguists and philosophers of language — that a cleaner sentence is not a better expression of the same idea but a different idea, because the words are the thought.
The premise, which Murray arrived at through practice rather than philosophy, holds that expression and thought are not separable. There is no thought existing independent of its expression, no idea hovering in pre-linguistic space waiting to be captured by the right words. The words are the thought. The structure is the argument. The metaphor is the understanding. Change the words and you change the thought — not because you have expressed the same thought differently, but because you have produced a different thought. Murray's sentence 'Revision is not just clarifying meaning, it is discovering meaning and clarifying it while it is being discovered' illustrates its own claim: the clarifying is the discovering, and the meaning is born in the act of making it clear.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The thesis has deep roots in twentieth-century thought — Benjamin Lee Whorf's hypothesis that the language one speaks shapes the thoughts one can think, Wittgenstein's