Fun fact: the word ‘ambiguous’, at least according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is ambiguous between two main types of meaning: uncertainty or dubiousness on the one hand and a sign bearing multiple meanings on the other. I mention this merely to disambiguate what this entry is about, which concerns a word or phrase enjoying multiple meanings. In this sense, ambiguity has been the source of much frustration, bemusement, and amusement for philosophers, lexicographers, linguists, cognitive scientists, literary theorists and critics, authors, poets, orators and just about everyone who considers the interpretation(s) of linguistic signs.
Philosophers’ interest in ambiguity has largely stemmed from concerns regarding the regimentation of natural language in formal logic: arguments that may look good in virtue of their linguistic form in fact can go very wrong if the words or phrases involved are equivocal. It would be logical folly, for example, to conclude from the true (on one reading) sentences ‘All bachelors are necessarily unmarried’ and ‘Adam was a bachelor’ that Adam was necessarily unmarried. In other words, philosophers have often found ambiguity the sort of thing one needs to avoid and eradicate when they do their serious philosophical business. Frege worried about the phenomenon enough to counsel against allowing any multiplicities of sense in a perfect language. Authors, poets, lyricists and the like, on the other hand, have often found ambiguity to be an extremely powerful tool. Thomas Pynchon’s sentence “we have forests full of game and hundreds of beaters who drive the animals toward the hunters such as myself who are waiting to shoot them,” (Against the Day, p. 46) utilizes the referential ambiguity of ‘them’ to great effect when said by his fictionalized Archduke Ferdinand. Shakespeare’s “Ask for me tomorrow and you shall find me a grave man” (Romeo and Juliet, Act III, Scene 1 line 97–98) plays cleverly on the double meaning of ‘grave’. Comedians have often found ambiguity useful in the misdirection essential to some forms of comedy. Groucho Marx’s “I shot an elephant in my pajamas” is a classic of this genre.
Ambiguity is important and it is worth examining what the phenomenon is and how it differs and relates to similar phenomena such as indexicality, polysemy, vagueness, and especially sense generality. While ‘is an uncle’ can be satisfied by both brothers of mothers and brothers of fathers, the phrase is not ambiguous but unspecified with respect to parent. The article will focus on what the phenomenon is and isn’t and deal with some of the interesting factors that confound the easy detection and categorization of apparent ambiguities.3. Types of Ambiguity
3.1 Lexical Ambiguity
3.2 Syntactic Ambiguity
3.3 Pragmatic Ambiguity
3.4 Other Interesting Cases
4. Detecting Ambiguity
4.1 Conjunction Reduction
4.2 Ellipsis
4.3 Contradiction Tests
4.4 Definitional Tests
4.5 More Spurious Tests
4.6 Problems for the Tests
4.7 Contextual Resolution and Degree of Zeugma
4.8 Metaphor and Non-Literal Usage
5. Philosophical Issues
5.1 Validity
5.2 Basic Semantic Methodology
5.3 The Analytic-Synthetic Distinction
5.4 The Flexibility of the Lexicon
5.5 Legal Interpretations
6. Ambiguity and Indexicality: Are They Easily Told Apart?
6.1 Deictic vs. Bound Anaphora
6.2 The Scope of Indefinites
6.3 Modals
Bibliography
Academic Tools
Other Internet Resources
Related Entries
[size=30]1. Introduction
Ambiguity is generally taken to be a property enjoyed by signs that bear multiple (legitimate) interpretations. In common parlance, the word ‘ambiguity’ is used loosely: often simple underspecificity will suffice for a charge of ambiguity. The U.S.’s policy towards the unification of China and Taiwan has been described as a policy of ‘strategic ambiguity’, one that allows the U.S. to be non-specific in its assertions about the status of Taiwan. ‘Jane’s sister will come to visit’ is sometimes thought to be ambiguous when Jane has multiple sisters. A movie with a character that heads to surgery at the end, leaving it open whether he lives or dies, is said to have an ambiguous ending. There is a medical condition known as ‘ambiguous genitalia’ in which the genitals don’t fall clearly, or exclusively, into male or female genitalia.
In many domains, however, theorists have found it useful to divide the phenomenon of ambiguity from other phenomena (e.g., underspecification, vagueness, context sensitivity). Ambiguity is of interest to philosophers for a variety of reasons, some of which we will look at below. First, ambiguity makes vivid some of the differences between formal languages and natural languages and presents some barriers to using the former to represent the latter. Second, ambiguity can have a deleterious effect on our ability to inspect the validity of arguments on account of possible equivocation. Third, ambiguity in art can intentionally (or unintentionally) increase the interest in a work of art by refusing to allow easy categorization and interpretation. Fourth, ambiguity in the laws can undermine their applicability and our ability to obey them. Finally, ambiguity is one important feature of our cognitive understanding and interpretative abilities. Studying ambiguity and how we resolve it can give us insight into both thought and interpretation.
Ambiguity has excited philosophers for a very, very long time. It was studied in the context of the study of fallacies in Aristotle’s
Sophistical Refutations. Aristotle identifies various fallacies associated with ambiguity and amphiboly
[1] writing:
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- اقتباس :
- There are three varieties of these ambiguities and amphibolies: (1) When either the expression or the name has strictly more than one meaning… (2) when by custom we use them so; (3) when words that have a simple sense taken alone have more than one meaning in combination; e.g. ‘knowing letters’. For each word, both ‘knowing’ and ‘letters’, possibly has a single meaning: but both together have more than one-either that the letters themselves have knowledge or that someone else has it of them. (Sophistical Refutations bk. 4)
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The stoics were also intrigued by ambiguity (see Atherton 1993). Chrysippus claimed at one point that every word is ambiguous—though by this he meant that the same person may understand a word spoken to him in many distinct ways. Philosophers concerned with the relation between language and thought, particularly those who thought there was a language in which we think, concerned themselves with whether the language in which we think could contain ambiguous phrases. Ockham, for example, was willing to countenance ambiguities in mental sentences of a language of thought but not mental terms in that language (see Spade p. 101). Frege contemplated non-overlap of sense in natural language in a famous footnote, writing:
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- اقتباس :
- …So long as the reference remains the same, such variations of sense may be tolerated, although they are to be avoided in the theoretical structure of a demonstrative science and ought not to occur in a perfect language. (Frege 1948 [1892], p. 210 fn. 2)
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Frege’s hostility to ambiguity in formal languages remains with us today. Frequently we use formal languages precisely so that we can disambiguate otherwise ambiguous sentences (brackets being a paradigm example of a disambiguating device).
One of the hardest problems in giving an account of ambiguity is to figure out what are the objects that are said to be ambiguous. Propositions, for example, are unambiguous (since they are meanings they can’t be subject to further considerations of meaning). This leaves a range of potential objects: utterances, utterances relative to a context, sentences, sentences relative to a context, sentences given discourse relations, inscriptions and a whole host of possibilities that need to be sorted out. The differences aren’t trivial: a written down sentence corresponds to many possible ways of being uttered in which features such as prosody can prevent certain meanings that the written down sentence seems capable of enjoying. Two utterances may sound the same (if they contain words that sound alike) without being spelt alike (if the words aren’t co-spelled) thus resulting in phonological ambiguity without corresponding ambiguity in written sentences. I’m going to (somewhat perversely) simply use ‘sentence’ and ‘phrase’ ambiguously, and I will attempt to disambiguate where the issue comes up.
One important question regarding ambiguity is how we ought to represent ambiguities. It’s tempting to see this as a question we could answer in any number of equally good ways. For example, we may choose to represent the meaning ‘bank’ disjunctively or we may choose to individuate ‘bank’ as multiple lexical items that simply sound and look alike, perhaps using subscripts. The worry, however, is that disjunctive truth conditions fail to uniquely represent ambiguity and that supplying subscripts simply masks the question of what the subscripts represent. This suggests that the issue is more like a problem than a nuisance or a trivial choice and actually has serious ramifications for how to pursue truth conditional semantics. (See Davidson 1967, Gillon 1990, and Saka 2007 (Ch. 6) for an interesting account of the problem regarding representing ambiguity.)
A brief terminological point: ‘polysemy’ refers to a phenomenon that is closely related to ambiguity, but the relation is not perfectly clear cut. It is sometimes characterized as a phenomenon subsumable under ambiguity (basically ambiguity where the meanings are tightly related) but sometimes it is taken to be a different phenomenon altogether. One traditional carving is that ambiguity in words is a matter of two lexical entries that correspond to the same word and polysemy a single lexeme that has multiple meanings.
[2] For the rest of this article, I will assume that polysemy is simply ambiguity with tightly corresponding meanings and I will not try to distinguish polysemy from ambiguity very carefully. If the cognitive linguists are right, there is no exact way to do this anyway.
[size=30]2. What (Linguistic) Ambigui[/size]
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Ambiguity
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