45 Ambiguous Terms

As a result of historical development, many words have a large range of meanings. This renders them ambiguous and leads to confusion in argument when such words occur as terms. To show the bare forms of proof and thus escape the ambiguity of language, modern logic dispenses in large part with ordinary vocabularies and reveals the structure of the various relationships in propositions by means of a notation of arbitrary symbols (aν v a; a·b ⊃ b·a). Most discussion cannot afford to be so abstract as this and must deal with political or social or every-day situations and so employs the rich and ambiguous vocabularies of the natural languages.

What helps control the ambiguity of language? The context will often determine with fair precision in which of its equivocal senses a word is being employed. Puns and homonyms ("raze" and "raise") are not apt to confuse an argument since the very extent of difference in their meanings ordinarily prevents one use from being mistaken for another. The shift in meaning of a single word around a common core is a more usual source of misunderstanding. Here, too, an explicit context is generally successful in defining by use, as it were, the sense intended. To take an instance, the word "speech" is no more ambiguous than many, yet it applies to several situations: "The Provencal speech [dialect, tongue] became a highly developed literary language." "Cicero's First Catiline is a model political speech [oration]." "The actor Garrick learned the brilliant new twenty-line speech [a part of the spoken role] in five minutes between acts." In the contexts the various senses of "speech" become perfectly distinct and give rise to no confusion. A second method of controlling the range is actual definition: "In this treatise we shall use 'speech' to stand for any sounds produced by the human larynx for the purpose of communication." All the kinds of ambiguity important to distinguish for argumentation occur where neither the context nor definition confines the area of meaning to one particular sense of a word.

In the first kind the actual object intended is left unspecified. This sort of ambiguity is trivial, since cross examination could always determine which object the speaker referred to. If in court a witness speaks ambiguously of "the evening I saw Jones," he is frequently required to specify his reference more accurately, "Do you mean the First of April?" Oracles are celebrated instances of this sort of ambiguity, though it is not easy to see how anyone could have been deceived by them.

EXAMPLE
Croesus, King of Lydia, planned to attack Persia. A prudent man, he first enquired of the Delphic Oracle whether Fortune would favor his enterprise. The Oracle declared, "Croesus, having crossed the river Halys, will destroy a great kingdom." Heartened by this, Croesus crossed the Halys, which separated his kingdom from Persia, and was utterly routed by Cyrus. Croesus, bereft of his kingdom, dispatched a messenger to the Oracle to complain of deceit. The Oracle characteristically retorted that the prophecy was correct, for a great kingdom had indeed been destroyed -- the kingdom of Croesus.

The second kind of ambiguity is also essentially trivial. It takes advantage of equivocal senses of a word or phrase to make a play on them. In the following example a play is made on the two distinct senses for the phrase "lose no time": "waste no time," "not delay." Thus this is really a pun.

EXAMPLE COMMENT
Reader Peter is talking to a freshman who comes to his office. "When you turn in your term paper, I shall lose no time in reading it." The student might well reply, "Then I shall lose no time in writing it."

The third variety has it in common with the second that it hovers between two distinct senses of a word, but the intention may not be a play on them. Sometimes this is by no means funny, as when it is the device of the loop-hole: the language of diplomacy and political concealment. A relatively innocent case is Calvin Cool-idge's laconic announcement after two terms in office, "I do not choose to run." Neither newspapermen at the time nor historians since have succeeded in deciphering it. What did the President mean?

"I do not choose (intend) to run." -- and I shall do as I intend.

"I do not choose (desire) to run." -- though duty may require it.

The final variety we shall distinguish has the traditional name "ambiguous terms." The argument shifts from one sense to another of a term, and what is shown earlier to apply to one sense is later on, often unconsciously, applied to another, simply because the same word commonly covers both. It is this variety that gives rise in argument to the demand "define vour terms."

EXAMPLE COMMENT
Peter remarks to a friend, "It doesn't make any difference whether you win or lose a war. War, as I look at it, is a game which everyone loses." In this abbreviated example, the shift occurs in two sentences. The words "win" and "lose" in the first sentence seem to refer to military victory and defeat, in the second sentence to the broad advantages of peace over war. It is probably true that nations engaged in modern war must lose in the sense of suffering human and material loss exceeding any advantages secured. But wars are indeed still "won" or "lost" in the sense of the victor forcing his will upon the defeated. There is a world of difference between winning and losing a war in this latter sense. Peter, it seems, is understandably disappointed with war as a human institution, and his strong feelings account for his being beguiled by this ambiguity.
A wife in recriminations against her spouse begins by accusing him of "neglecting" chores: taking out the rubbish, tending the yard, walking the dog. After a few minutes she says fiercely, "You neglect everything. You neglect me shamefully. You neglect your own children." The first charge uses the term "neglect" in the sense of negligence in taking care of concrete duties. It will be seen that as the woman's feeling begins to mount, she shifts to a more general sense of "neglect." The berated husband is now in a bad way. Whatever he might have to confess concerning the rubbish and dog-walking, what can he say to the terrible accusation of "neglecting" wife and children? If the discussion had been kept orderly, there is at least a chance that the good wife would have seen where she was going in time to keep her sense of proportion. Whether or not she convinced her husband that he was a scoundrel, it seems likely that before she fell silent she convinced herself. And the children, too, if they overheard.
A famous philosopher argues that since the meaning of "Peter" is the identical man we knew before, see now, and will recognize tomorrow, the meaning of anything at all is its identity. Moreover, since the meaning of anything to an organism is precisely the value that that something has for the organism, this identical recurrence means the value the something has. Thus all value depends on identity. For this reason, pluralistic accounts of the world, as they stress discreteness and change instead of the unity, the identity, of experience, destroy value and are meaningless. If you do not understand this bit of philosophizing, do not worry: it is unintelligible. It is put in here to illustrate how in actual argument the shift between ambiguous senses of a term often is by insensible degrees, so that it is very hard at times to see that what had been demonstrated by means of the use of one sense is now being applied to something quite different. Characteristically, this philosophical argument originally appeared in an elaborate context, full of illustration, allusion, incidental demonstration. This sort of spell weaving takes time; for that reason no brief examples can seem as plausible as the device often is in fact. Truncated, the shift is too obvious to succeed.

C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, from whom the example is borrowed, wrote a famous book, The Meaning of Meaning, to show that such shiftings about among the accommodating uses of "meaning," even in philosophy, where one would expect some care, vitiate many a discussion. Incidentally, Ogden and Richards complete the argument above in an amusing way. If the identical recurrence of anything is the meaning of it, and if the meaning of anything is its value, the sentence above, "identical occurrence means the value," by cancelling gives "Meaning means meaning." The authors suggest that this sentence loses in force what it gains in clarity. For another philosophical example exploiting the ambiguity of meaning and the rhetorical force of mean, see #50.