As scientists have probed more deeply into the nature of language comprehension, this kind of result has proved less and less surprising. Researchers have discovered that what the text implies but doesn’t say is a necessary part of its understood meaning. In fact, what the text doesn’t say often far exceeds what it says. The reader or listener has to fill in the blanks and make the unstated connections in order to make sense of the text. This is hardly a new observation. The ancient Greeks knew it, and Aristotle even gave the phenomenon a name—enthymeme, which is technically a syllogism with
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