Ambiguity, Vagueness, Generality, Disambiguation

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2 responses to “Ambiguity, Vagueness, Generality, Disambiguation”

1. 

   james soriano

   June 10, 2024

   These are very useful distinctions, Bill, but what struck me after I thought about them was that your post could be written only by someone who knows the difference between vagueness, etc., and distinctness.
   Many people have vague ideas and are not even aware they are vague; thus they cannot, and for those who are ideologically committed, will not, make the move towards distinctness.
   Nothing wrong with vagueness or ambiguity as such. We all learn complex things starting from a base of indistinct ideas, and gradually we move on to distinctness and clarity. But you got to put your mind to it to get there. You must first be aware that somethings’s wrong and that it takes an intellectual effort to fix it..
   I’d guess that Socrates was invited to many a dinner party because his host reveled in the way he was able to pull distinctness out of the ambiguous and vague ideas of the other guests.
   What also struck me about your post is that “vagueness” and her sisters exist not only in our sentences and in building-block ideas, but more importantly they’re in our propositions and arguments. The sentences in the abortion example you gave are each distinct and intelligible, but when they are strung together in an argument, we can hear that something’s wrong with it.

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2. 

   BV

   June 10, 2024

   The fetus is a part of a woman’s body.
   A woman has the right to do whatever she wants with any part of her body.
   Therefore
   A woman has the right to do whatever she wants with the fetus, including having it killed.
   The argument commits the fallacy of equivocation: the middle term ‘part’ is ambiguous. The problem with ‘part’ is not that it is vague (has no definite meaning) but that it is ambiguous (has two different meanings).

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