SELLING ICE TO PEOPLE WHO DON’T KNOW WHAT ICE IS. The article by Wu and Dunning begins with the story of an entrepreneur in 1806 who brought a shipload of ice to Martinique for sale. There turned out to be no market for ice. These tropical customers had never known cold and could not imagine it.”His sizable investment melted away unappreciated and unsold in the Caribbean heat,”
The story makes for a good beginning because the problem for the business was not a failure of language. It was a lack of physical experience on the part of the proposed customers. Hypocognition is a fancy name for “the lack of a linguistic or cognitive representation for an object, category, or idea.”