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A mishearing of such, based on incorrectly resolved ambiguity, is called a mondegreen. Semantic ambiguity happens when a sentence contains an ambiguous word or phrase—a word or phrase that has more than one meaning. In "We saw her duck" example due to Richard Nordquist , the word "duck" can refer either. Lexical ambiguity is contrasted with semantic ambiguity. The former represents a choice between a finite number of known and meaningful context-dependent interpretations. The latter represents a choice between any number of possible interpretations, none of which may have a standard agreed-upon meaning.
This form of ambiguity is closely related to vagueness. Linguistic ambiguity can be a problem in law , because the interpretation of written documents and oral agreements is often of paramount importance.
Philosophers and other users of logic spend a lot of time and effort searching for and removing or intentionally adding ambiguity in arguments because it can lead to incorrect conclusions and can be used to deliberately conceal bad arguments. For example, a politician might say, "I oppose taxes which hinder economic growth", an example of a glittering generality. Some will think he opposes taxes in general because they hinder economic growth.
Others may think he opposes only those taxes that he believes will hinder economic growth. In writing, the sentence can be rewritten to reduce possible misinterpretation, either by adding a comma after "taxes" to convey the first sense or by changing "which" to "that" to convey the second sense or by rewriting it in other ways.
The devious politician hopes that each constituent will interpret the statement in the most desirable way, and think the politician supports everyone's opinion.
However, the opposite can also be true — an opponent can turn a positive statement into a bad one if the speaker uses ambiguity intentionally or not. The logical fallacies of amphiboly and equivocation rely heavily on the use of ambiguous words and phrases. In continental philosophy particularly phenomenology and existentialism , there is much greater tolerance of ambiguity, as it is generally seen as an integral part of the human condition.
Martin Heidegger argued that the relation between the subject and object is ambiguous, as is the relation of mind and body, and part and whole. Thus, although some things may be certain, they have little to do with Dasein's sense of care and existential anxiety, e. In calling his work Being and Nothingness an "essay in phenomenological ontology" Jean-Paul Sartre follows Heidegger in defining the human essence as ambiguous, or relating fundamentally to such ambiguity. Simone de Beauvoir tries to base an ethics on Heidegger's and Sartre's writings The Ethics of Ambiguity , where she highlights the need to grapple with ambiguity: And the ethics which they have proposed to their disciples have always pursued the same goal.
It has been a matter of eliminating the ambiguity by making oneself pure inwardness or pure externality, by escaping from the sensible world or being engulfed by it, by yielding to eternity or enclosing oneself in the pure moment. Let us try to assume our fundamental ambiguity. It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our life that we must draw our strength to live and our reason for acting".
Other continental philosophers suggest that concepts such as life, nature, and sex are ambiguous.
Corey Anton has argued that we cannot be certain what is separate from or unified with something else: Following Ernest Becker, he argues that the desire to 'authoritatively disambiguate' the world and existence has led to numerous ideologies and historical events such as genocide. On this basis, he argues that ethics must focus on 'dialectically integrating opposites' and balancing tension, rather than seeking a priori validation or certainty.
Like the existentialists and phenomenologists, he sees the ambiguity of life as the basis of creativity. In literature and rhetoric, ambiguity can be a useful tool.
Groucho Marx's classic joke depends on a grammatical ambiguity for its humor, for example: How he got in my pajamas, I'll never know". Songs and poetry often rely on ambiguous words for artistic effect, as in the song title "Don't It Make My Brown Eyes Blue" where "blue" can refer to the color, or to sadness.
In the narrative, ambiguity can be introduced in several ways: Scott Fitzgerald uses the latter type of ambiguity with notable effect in his novel The Great Gatsby. Christianity and Judaism employ the concept of paradox synonymously with 'ambiguity'. Many Christians and Jews endorse Rudolf Otto's description of the sacred as 'mysterium tremendum et fascinans', the awe-inspiring mystery which fascinates humans. Chesterton regularly employed paradox to tease out the meanings in common concepts which he found ambiguous or to reveal meaning often overlooked or forgotten in common phrases.
The title of one of his most famous books, Orthodoxy, itself employing such a paradox. Metonymy involves the use of the name of a subcomponent part as an abbreviation, or jargon, for the name of the whole object for example "wheels" to refer to a car, or "flowers" to refer to beautiful offspring, an entire plant, or a collection of blooming plants. In modern vocabulary, critical semiotics,[9] metonymy encompasses any potentially ambiguous word substitution that is based on contextual contiguity located close together , or a function or process that an object performs, such as "sweet ride" to refer to a nice car.
Metonym miscommunication is considered a primary mechanism of linguistic humor. In music , pieces or sections which confound expectations and may be or are interpreted simultaneously in different ways are ambiguous, such as some polytonality , polymeter , other ambiguous meters or rhythms , and ambiguous phrasing , or Stein , p. The music of Africa is often purposely ambiguous. To quote Sir Donald Francis Tovey , p. In visual art, certain images are visually ambiguous, such as the Necker cube , which can be interpreted in two ways.
Perceptions of such objects remain stable for a time, then may flip, a phenomenon called multistable perception. The opposite of such ambiguous images are impossible objects. Pictures or photographs may also be ambiguous at the semantic level: Some languages have been created with the intention of avoiding ambiguity, especially lexical ambiguity.
Lojban and Loglan are two related languages which have been created for this, focusing chiefly on syntactic ambiguity as well. The languages can be both spoken and written. These languages are intended to provide a greater technical precision over big natural languages, although historically, such attempts at language improvement have been criticized.
Languages composed from many diverse sources contain much ambiguity and inconsistency. The many exceptions to syntax and semantic rules are time-consuming and difficult to learn. In computer science, the SI prefixes kilo- , mega- and giga- were historically used in certain contexts to mean either the first three powers of , 2 and 3 contrary to the metric system in which these units unambiguously mean one thousand, one million, and one billion.
Ambiguous definition, open to or having several possible meanings or interpretations; equivocal: an ambiguous answer. See more. Synonyms for ambiguous at www.farmersmarketmusic.com with free online thesaurus, antonyms , and definitions. Find descriptive alternatives for ambiguous.
This usage is particularly prevalent with electronic memory devices e. DRAM addressed directly by a binary machine register where a decimal interpretation makes no practical sense. Subsequently, the Ki, Mi, and Gi prefixes were introduced so that binary prefixes could be written explicitly, also rendering k, M, and G unambiguous in texts conforming to the new standard — this led to a new ambiguity in engineering documents lacking outward trace of the binary prefixes necessarily indicating the new style as to whether the usage of k, M, and G remains ambiguous old style or not new style.
Note also that 1 M where M is ambiguously 1,, or 1,, is less uncertain than the engineering value 1. Mathematical notation , widely used in physics and other sciences , avoids many ambiguities compared to expression in natural language. However, for various reasons, several lexical , syntactic and semantic ambiguities remain.
The ambiguity in the style of writing a function should not be confused with a multivalued function , which can and should be defined in a deterministic and unambiguous way. Several special functions still do not have established notations. Usually, the conversion to another notation requires to scale the argument or the resulting value; sometimes, the same name of the function is used, causing confusions.
Examples of such underestablished functions:.
Ambiguous expressions often appear in physical and mathematical texts. It is common practice to omit multiplication signs in mathematical expressions. In each case of use of such notations, the reader is supposed to be able to perform the deduction and reveal the true meaning. Creators of algorithmic languages try to avoid ambiguities. The Wolfram Language used in Mathematica allows the user to omit the multiplication symbol, but requires square brackets to indicate the argument of a function; square brackets are not allowed for grouping of expressions.
The order of operations may depend on the context. In most programming languages , the operations of division and multiplication have equal priority and are executed from left to right. In addition, it is common to write an argument of a function without parenthesis, which also may lead to ambiguity.
Sometimes, one uses italics letters to denote elementary functions. A comma in subscripts and superscripts sometimes is omitted; it is also ambiguous notation. The same may apply to any other use of ambiguous notations. Then, there is an "unwritten rule": Such ambiguities easily lead to confusions, especially if some normalized adimensional , dimensionless variables are used.
The reader is supposed to guess from the context. Some physical quantities do not yet have established notations; their value and sometimes even dimension , as in the case of the Einstein coefficients , depends on the system of notations. Many terms are ambiguous. Each use of an ambiguous term should be preceded by the definition, suitable for a specific case. What made you want to look up ambiguous? Please tell us where you read or heard it including the quote, if possible.
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Abbreviation Ambiguity law Ambiguity tolerance Amphibology Decision problem Disambiguation disambiguation Double entendre. In calling his work Being and Nothingness an "essay in phenomenological ontology" Jean-Paul Sartre follows Heidegger in defining the human essence as ambiguous, or relating fundamentally to such ambiguity. In ambiguity, specific and distinct interpretations are permitted although some may not be immediately obvious , whereas with information that is vague, it is difficult to form any interpretation at the desired level of specificity. In each case of use of such notations, the reader is supposed to be able to perform the deduction and reveal the true meaning. New York Times "The election law in New York is written in an ill-defined, ambiguous way," Goldfeder said, adding that he did not believe any laws were broken.
The awkward case of 'his or her'. Identify the word pairs with a common ancestor. Test your knowledge - and maybe learn something along the way. Other Words from ambiguous ambiguously adverb. Choose the Right Synonym for ambiguous obscure , dark , vague , enigmatic , cryptic , ambiguous , equivocal mean not clearly understandable. Ambivalent The difficulty that many people have in distinguishing between ambiguous and ambivalent shows that all that is needed to create confusion with words is to begin them with several of the same letters.
Examples of ambiguous in a Sentence Greater familiarity with this artist makes one's assessment of him more tentative rather than less. His best pictures exude a hypersensitive, ambiguous aura of grace. He looked at her with an ambiguous smile. Due to the ambiguous nature of the question, it was difficult to choose the right answer.
Recent Examples on the Web Despite the woman's appearance—deep, tan, racially ambiguous skin; full lips; and wavy hair—a deeper dive through Emma Hallberg's feed showed that before all the spray tans, her skin was actually quite pale. First Known Use of ambiguous , in the meaning defined at sense 1a. Learn More about ambiguous.
Resources for ambiguous Time Traveler! Explore the year a word first appeared. Listen to Our Podcast about ambiguous. Get Word of the Day delivered to your inbox! From the Editors at Merriam-Webster. Dictionary Entries near ambiguous ambient ambiente ambiguity ambiguous ambiguous figure ambiguous middle ambilanak.