A Dictionary of Philosophy, Third Edition
. The property, had by some terms, of having two or more meanings. Ambiguity is not the same as VAGUENESS. ‘Bald’ is vague (how many hairs can a bald man have?) but not ambiguous. An ambiguous term can be quite precise in each of its senses. Also it can be argued that ambiguity applies to terms, vagueness to concepts. ‘How ambiguous is “ambiguous”?’ is a favourite philosophical question. Ambiguity may apply to words, phrases and sentences, considered in the abstract, or to utterances considered as uttered on a given occasion.
‘Bank’, connected with rivers and money, may be treated as two words with the same sound but different meanings or as one word with different meanings. Philologists would call ‘bank’ two words if its uses have different etymologies, but philosophers often arbitrarily treat it as one word or two. Such words, especially when treated as one word with different meanings, are often called equivocal, or homonyms.
Phrases or sentences can be ambiguous while none of the words in them is so. In ‘little girls’ camp’ either the girls or the camp may be little. This is sometimes called amphiboly.
The ambiguity of ‘Jack hits James and Jill hit him’ depends not on the meaning of ‘him’ but on who is being referred to by ‘him’ on the particular occasion of utterance; ‘him’ here has ambiguity of reference. Where the ambiguity depends on the structure of the sentence or expression, as here and with amphiboly, we have syntactical ambiguity. Where it depends on the meanings of individual words or expressions we have semantic ambiguity. ‘Pretty little girls’ is a mixed example, where the semantic ambiguity of ‘pretty’ affects its syntactic role according as ‘pretty’ qualifies ‘girls’ or modifies ‘little’. Pragmatic ambiguity is ambiguity in what is done in saying something, as ‘You’re a fine fellow!’ may be sincere or sarcastic. ‘Ambiguity’ itself is sometimes used in wider, sometimes in narrower, senses.
Some words seem to have senses which differ, but are related. A healthy body is a flourishing one, while a healthy climate produces or preserves health and a healthy complexion is a sign of it. ‘Healthy’ is therefore often said to have focal meaning (Owen). It senses ‘focus’ on one dominant sense. Words like ‘big’, which are syncategorematic (see CATEGORIES), have something like focal meaning, in that it makes a difference what standards we use in applying them. A big mouse is not a big animal, so that to call something ‘big’ without further ado, can be ambiguous; see ATTRIBUTIVE.
When the ambiguities of an expression can be predicted according to a rule the expression has systematic ambiguity. On the theory of TYPES words like ‘class’ are systematically or typically ambiguous because their meaning varies according to the type to which they belong.
Other kinds of ambiguity, or related notions, include analogical and metaphorical uses of expressions, e.g. God is sometimes called ‘wise’ in a sense different from, thought analogous to, that in which men are wise. Since many terms are ambiguous in this way when applied to God and men, this can be regarded as a case of systematic ambiguity; it is also related to focal meaning.
Some pervasive ambiguities are given special names, such as process/product ambiguity of words like ‘vision’ which can mean power of seeing or something seen, or ‘statement’ which can mean act of stating or what is stated. Many philosophically important terms have this ambiguity. See also OPEN TEXTURE.
W.Leszl, Logic and Metaphysics in Aristotle, Editrice Antenore, Padua, 1970, part II, chapter 1. (Kinds of ambiguity in Aristotle.)
G.E.L.Owen, ‘Logic and metaphysics in some earlier works of Aristotle’, in I.During and G.E.L.Owen (eds), Aristotle and Plato in the Mid-Fourth Century, Almquist and Wiksell, Göteborg, 1960, and ‘Aristotle on the snares of ontology’, in R.Bambrough (ed.), New Essays on Plato and Aristotle, RKP, 1965. D.W.Hamlyn, ‘Focal meaning’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1977–8. (Discussions of focal meaning and its significance in Aristotle (small amount of Greek in Owen). Cf. esp. § 2 of latter, and also (for a related concept) R.Robinson, ‘The concept of knowledge’, Mind, 1971, p. 20.)
W.V.O.Quine, Word and Object, Wiley, 1960, §§ 27–9. (Various kinds of ambiguity, § 216 discusses vagueness.)
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