No on claiming this is a hard science; it's a form of communication. Dismissing it as pseudoscience is like saying that linguistics is a pseudoscience because words can be ambiguous.

You probably mean formal semantics in particular, not linguistics in general. Linguistics knows and assumes that there is semantic drift in words, over time, space, social class, purpose, register… Part of its field is precisely to detect and describe this.

How would one know if babies are experiencing pleasure or not unless there were some general rules of nonverbal communication?

Tomographies.


I agree with you more than with Dante here, but those two are tangents which are irrelevant at best.