Vague and Ambiguous

virtuoso main task of critical thinking is to strike these linguistic pits. Let us start with the first major pitf completely obscurity. Obscurity here refers to unreadable meanspiriteding. A concept or a linguistic expression ro white plague be undecipherable for various thinks. One reason is that it might beambiguous, i. e. having more than one means. The other reason is that it might be slow. A margeinal is said to be vague if thither atomic number 18 borderline cases where it is inde borderinate as to whether it applies or non.Finally, a landmark might also have an unclear meaning in that its meaning is half(prenominal). Let us look at these cases one by one. M08. 1 Ambiguity There atomic number 18 actually different kinds of ambiguity Lexical ambiguity This is a single word or landmark having more than one meaning in the language. For runple, the word thick(p) bathroom mean profoundity (What you have said is very deep. ), or it tin can be used to describe ph ysical depth (This hole is very deep). Similarly for words corresponding young (inexperienced or young of age), till (river bank or financial institution), etc. Referential ambiguity It is not clear which thing or group is being referred to.This often arises when the stage setting does not make it clear what a pronoun or quantifier is referring to. affiliate hit atomic number 31 and then she started bleeding. Who is hurt? ally or Georgia? Everybody is coming to the party. Certainly everybody does not refer to every human being in the whole world. simply then which group of tribe are we talking about? Of instruction in normal situations the speaker unremarkably has some specific group of bulk in mind. numerous people like to make very general statements, such(prenominal) as All politicians are corrupt. Literally, this statement implies that in that location is no politician who is not corrupted.But of course we can think of many counterexamples to such a claim. So the person who makes the statement might say I dont really mean each and every politician. But then who exactly are the people referred to? Syntactic ambiguity This means having more than one meaning because there is more than one way to interpret the grammatical structure. This can demote flat when it is clear what the meanings of the individual words are. We shall be discussing violence on TV. It might mean the discussion go away be conducted during a boob tube programme, or it might meanviolence on TVis the head to be discussed.When dealing with ambiguous language the thing to do is of course to clarify the meaning of the expression, for example by listing out all the different possible interpretations. This process of removing ambiguity is call disambiguation. M08. 2 Vagueness An term isvagueif it has an imprecise boundary. This means that there are cases where it is indeterminate whether the term applies or not. For example, a small exclusively closed elan with no wind ows or doors and no light inside is certain depressed. If we switch on a 100W lightbulbs inside it will become bright.But we turn on the subdued for the light and dim the light slowly until it goes out, then the room will gradually change from a bright room to a semidark one. But there is no precise point at which the room suddenly ceases to be bright. Similarly, there is no precise point at which the room suddenly becomes dark. The terms dark and bright do not have clear boundaries of applications in this situation, and we say that these terms are vague. The term a marvellous person is also vague in that there are certain cases where it is hard to say whether a person is tall or not, but this indecision is not due to lack of intimacy about that persons height.You might know exactly how tall that person is, but still you dont know whether he is tall or not. This is because the meaning of the term is not precise enough. Other examples of vague terms heavy, dark, mountain, cleve r, cheap. Notice thatwe should make a property between vagueness and ambiguity. A word can be vague nonetheless though it is not ambiguous, and an ambiguous term having more than one meaning would not be said to be vague if the different meanings it has are very precise. Vague terms can be effective in everyday lifebecause often we do not have to be too precise.How precise we should be depends of course on the context. A figure of (bad) argument about vagueness which we often encounter There is really no difference between X and Y because it is often instead unclear whether something is X or Y. Example There is really no such thing as objective truth or falsity. Whether something is true or false is often hard to say. This is a bad argument because even though a distinction might have borderline cases, it does not follow that the distinction is not real. For example, it might sometimes be unclear whether a room is dark or bright.But (a) there is still a real distinction bet ween dark and bright rooms, and (b) there can be clear cases where we have one but not the other. Vagueness should be avoided when we want to speak precisely, as vagueness decreases the informational content of a claim. For example, compare these sentences He is quite old, actually exactly eighty years old. He is quite old, actually about eighty years old. He is quite old. Many students often like to ask questions such as Is there issue to be a lot of homework for this course? Is the final exam going to be difficult? But of course words like difficult and a lot are vague. Vague terms can make a claim vague and impossible to confirm or disprove. Horoscope predictions for example Be prepared for a change of direction this hebdomad as something crops up. SCMP Sunday Post Magazine. This piece of news is going to concern the market somewhat. But of course one might try to use vagueness to ones advantage in order to be non-committal or imprecise. As a minister I agree that to some extent I am responsible. The government will deal with this problem in an appropriate manner when the right time comes. M08. Incomplete Meaning A term has anincomplete meaningif the property or relation it expresses depends on some provided parameter to be specified by the context, either explicitly or implicitly. This includes terms such as useful, authoritative, correspondent and punter. Practically all objects are useful and important only in some respects but not others. For example, is love more important than money? Well, it depends. If you are starving to death, then money is more important. But if you are trying to determine which of the two contributes more to a talented and fulfilling life, then the answer might be different.So just saying that something is useful or important is empty unless it is made clear in what way it is so. This is also necessary if we want to evaluate whether what is said is true or not. The education director shall visit Scotland to stu dy their educational system because it is alike to the one in Hong Kong. Will this years final exam be similar to the one last year? It is better to be beautiful than to be good. But . . . it is better to be good than to be ugly. Oscar Wilde (1854 1900) Art neer improves, but . . . the material of art is never quite the same. T. S. Eliot (1888 1965)