AMBIGUITY

Defenition

     A word, phrase, or sentence is ambiguous if it has more than one meaning. The word 'light', for example, can mean not very heavy or not very dark. However, Ambiguity can have both a lexical and a structural basis. The notion of ambiguity has philosophical applications. For example, identifying an ambiguity can aid in solving a philosophical problem.Suppose one wonders how two people can have the same idea, say of a unicorn. This can seem puzzling until one distinguishes 'idea' in the sense of a particular psychological occurrence, a mental representation, from 'idea' in the sense of an abstract, shareable concept. On the other hand, gratuitous claims of ambiguity can make for overly simple solutions.

Types of Ambiguity

     There are two types of ambiguity, lexicaland structural. Lexical ambiguity is by far the more common. Everyday examples include nouns like 'chip', 'pen' and 'suit', verbs like 'call', 'draw' and 'run', and adjectives like 'deep', 'dry' and 'hard'. There are various tests for ambiguity. One test is having two unrelated antonyms, as with 'hard', which has both 'soft' and 'easy' as opposites. Another is the conjunction reduction test. Consider the sentence, 'The tailor pressed one suit in his shop and one in the municipal court'. Evidence that the word 'suit' (not to mention 'press') is ambiguous is provided by the anomaly of the 'crossed interpretation' of the sentence, on which 'suit' is used to refer to an article of clothing and 'one' to a legal action.Sometimes one meaning of a word is derived from another. For example, the cognitive sense of 'see' seems derived from its visual sense. The sense of 'weigh' in 'He weighed the package' is derived from its sense in 'The package weighed two pounds'. Similarly, the transitive senses of 'burn', 'fly' and 'walk' are derived from their intransitive senses.

    Structural ambiguity occurs when a phrase or sentence has more than one underlying structure, such as the phrases 'Tibetan history teacher', 'a student of high moral principles' and 'short men and women', and the sentences 'The girl hit the boy with a book' and 'Visiting relatives can be boring'. These ambiguities are said to be structural because each such phrase can be represented in two structurally different ways, e.g., '[Tibetan history] teacher' and 'Tibetan [history teacher]'. Indeed, the existence of such ambiguities provides strong evidence for a level of underlying syntactic structure (see SYNTAX). Consider the structurally ambiguous sentence, 'The chicken is ready to eat', which could be used to describe either a hungry chicken or a broiled chicken. It is arguable that the operative reading depends on whether or not the implicit subject of the infinitive clause 'to eat' is tied anaphorically to the subject ('the chicken') of the main clause.

Philosofical Relevance

    Although unnoticed ambiguities can create philosophical problems, ambiguity is philosophically important also because philosophers often make spurious claims of it.Philosophers sometimes lament the prevalence of ambiguity in natural languages and yearn for an ideal language in which it is absent. But ambiguity is a fact of linguistic life. Despite the potentially endless supply of words, many words do double duty or more. And despite the unlimited number of sentences, many have several meanings, and their utterance must be disambiguated in light of the speaker's likely intentions.

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