When we write to communicate something, often we miss out on certain details because we implicitly assume it to be obvious and that the reader would comprehend it without seeing it in words. Is there a word or a phrase to refer precisely to this human tendency?
Example usage quoted below:
A common problem with communication is unwritten assumptions. Naturally, not everything in our mind gets translated to text. This leads to a sort of void in the reader's mind, which -- given the propensity of the human mind -- leads to "filling in" with assumptions of their own.
We call this behaviour in human communication ____. The problem of ____ in communication can be mitigated by a number of ways:
- by being explicit in communicating one's thoughts and ideas, leaving nothing 'assumed', albeit at the expense of being verbose
- by grounding
(The first paragraph of this example is actually from this blog post of mine which might give addition context to the single-word-request.)
Perhaps there is a term in psycholinguistics (specifically language production) to refer to this phenomenon?
Related phrases
EDIT:EDIT 1: Argument analysis is another field that could potentially help?
when people present arguments, they do not always mention all of the beliefs which they hold which are pertinent unstated claims, the truth of which is a necessary condition of the argument’s working the way it should. People could not state everything pertinent to the argument in this way. They necessarily leave much unstated. Often unstated assumptions would be accepted by virtually everyone, and it would be a great bore for the arguer and the audience to spell them out. Sometimes arguers are not aware of their unstated assumptions; sometimes these assumptions are highly questionable, and neglecting to spell them out lulls the unwary audience into accepting things it would not have granted on critical scrutiny. It is often said that such unstated assumptions are the missing premises of the stated argument. https://ecampusontario.pressbooks.pub/wsia062018/chapter/5/
This is the key part from the quote above:
Sometimes arguers are not aware of their unstated assumptions; [..] and neglecting to spell them out lulls the unwary audience into accepting things it would not have granted on critical scrutiny
This makes sense from logic/argumentation point of view, but applied to the more general communication (not argumentation) context, it would instead look like this:
Sometimes writers are not aware of their unstated assumptions; [..] and neglecting to spell them out lulls the readers into assuming different things than the writer intended (and assumed)
And this is precisely what the word being requested here would refer to.
EDIT 2: Implicit communication (similar to implicit assumption) seems to touch on the heart of the matter, though the phrase can mean something else.
