What is the difference between ambiguity and subtlety

The lexicon is highly productive and easily extended. Most people, including myself, upon hearing:. However, upon learning that there is a car by the same name made by Volkswagen, it will be much less clear to me that I know what she bought.

Similar phenomena include dead metaphors and idioms. These clearly pass the ambiguity tests above by exhibiting zeugma, i. It clearly has two readings but whether or not these are to be reflected as lexical meanings is a difficult and vague matter — not that it clearly matters all that much in most cases. On the other hand, the facts about ambiguity can matter a great deal when it comes to determining policy, extension of law etc.

The law is sensitive to this and makes certain division between ambiguities. For example, the law divides between patent and latent ambiguity, where the former roughly corresponds to a case where the meaning of a law is unclear, the latter to cases where the meaning is clear but applies equally well to highly disparate things.

In effect, this is the difference between ambiguity in sense and ambiguity in reference. A famous example of such an ambiguity is the succession of the vice president, where the framers stipulate that:.

As the distinction has no real legal relevance in this case, it is ignored as it generally is in common parlance. In section 2 we looked at phenomena that were not the same as ambiguity; in this section, we look at a few cases in which we might have been wrong to tear them apart. Various theories of anaphora, however, have claimed that we can dispense with the fundamental ambiguity between free and bound anaphora and unify the treatment of the two.

Dynamic Semantics aspires to offer just such a unified account, taking all anaphora to always refer to discourse referents, or functions from information states to information states. This provides a unified treatment of the function of anaphora in natural language and dispenses with the need to think of anaphoric interpretation as ambiguous as opposed to merely context-sensitive.

See Heim , , and Kamp Maybe so; but most quantifiers in fact cannot escape from relative clauses. In fact, it has been noted that indefinites seem to escape from nearly any normal scope island whatsoever. This suggests that treating the various readings as an ambiguity akin to other scopal ambiguities is mistaken. Domain restriction traditionally is treated as a matter of context sensitivity rather than ambiguity.

We thus have some reason to doubt that the right treatment of 77 has much to do with the phenomenon of scope. As noted above, modals seem to come in various flavours doxastic, metaphysical, logical, deontic, practical….

It is tempting to treat these as ambiguities involving the modal term. However, it is worth noting that other treatments abound. Kratzer treats modals as univocal but indexical: they get their differing interpretations by taking in different input sets of worlds and orderings induced on the relevant sets.

A really interesting case that may be loosely described as ambiguity at the level of a sentence concerns focal stress and its myriad of interesting effects. Generally focal stress is well known to co-ordinate assertions with questions under discuss and to introduce sets of alternatives into a discourse.

In particular, these alternative sets can have truth conditional effects, for example:. Cancellation is a procedure by which an explicit denial of putatively conveyed information is conjoined to the original utterance to see if the result is a contradiction.

For example, consider an utterance of:. The non-bracketed sentence, absent an utterance of the bracketed content, will typically convey the order events as being mirrored in the order of the conjuncts. The Gricean stories about how we come about this extra information in non-cancellation cases is fairly well known. But perhaps an ambiguity in the assignment of times to the present tense markers is, and the putative cancellation serves to indicate the intended resolution of the those variables?

Lepore and Stone put disambiguation to work in an attempt to show that ambiguities in interpretation are more rife and wide spread than we might have previously assumed. If they are right, ambiguity plays a more central role than perhaps might have been thought in sentence, utterance and discourse interpretation. It remains to see if they are. The point of these examples is that it is often difficult to tell which theoretical treatment best explains a case of multiple interpretability.

It is all too easy to notice an apparent ambiguity, but often all too difficult to explain its nature. Thanks to Paul Saka for detailed comments and helpful discussion that helped me produce the first revision of the entry. Thanks to Jeff Pelletier for very helpful suggestions that helped a great deal with the second revision. Introduction 2. Types of Ambiguity 3. Detecting Ambiguity 4. Philosophical Issues 5. Bound Anaphora 6.

Introduction Ambiguity is generally taken to be a property enjoyed by signs that bear multiple legitimate interpretations in a language or, more generally, some system of signs. Aristotle identifies various fallacies associated with ambiguity and amphiboly [ 1 ] writing: There are three varieties of these ambiguities and amphibolies: 1 When either the expression or the name has strictly more than one meaning… 2 when by custom we use them so; 3 when words that have a simple sense taken alone have more than one meaning in combination; e.

Frege contemplated non-overlap of sense in natural language in a famous footnote, writing: …So long as the reference remains the same, such variations of sense may be tolerated, although they are to be avoided in the theoretical structure of a demonstrative science and ought not to occur in a perfect language. Types of Ambiguity There are different sources and types of ambiguities. Similarly, a phrase can be ambiguous between an adjunct and an argument: John floated the boat between the rocks.

Thematic assignments can be similarly ambiguous at the level of LF with deleted phrases: The chicken is ready to eat. The following ambiguity, for example, is borne directly out of failure to tell which connective has widest scope: He got drunk and fired or divorced.

Consider John ought to be at home by now. Similarly: The coin might come up heads. Similarly: You must eat a piece of cake. For example: Every woman squeezed a man. These ambiguities can be very difficult to hear in some cases.

For example: Someone is in a car accident every 10 seconds. P2 All bachelors are necessarily unmarried. C Therefore John is necessarily unmarried. The following, according to Russell, is ambiguous: The present king of France is not bald. As is: All that glitters is not gold. His 1 mother loves John 1. For example the following differ in their potential for use in speech acts though they seem to express similar content: Can you pass the salt?

Are you able to pass the salt? Donnellan writes: It does not seem possible to say categorically of a definite description in a particular sentence that it is a referring expression of course, one could say this if he meant that it might be used to refer.

Perhaps we could say that the sentence is pragmatically ambiguous …. Donnellan, p. But that need not be the case: it may presuppose that Maria solved the problem as well as having done something else, as in: Maria came up with the problem. Maria solved the problem too. Kent Bach explores the intriguing case of: I love you too. This can mean at least one of four distinct things: I love you just like you love me I love you just like someone else does I love you and I love someone else I love you as well as bearing some other relationship i.

Consider: The politicians lifted the piano. Sam and Jess brokered deals. The following is clearly ambiguous: John loves his mother and Bill does too. Similar ambiguities come up in cases such as: Sam loves Jess more than Jason. Non-Generic Readings Some terms are ambiguous between a generic and non-generic reading, and the sentences they play into are similarly ambiguous between the two readings.

For example: Dinosaurs ate kelp. Carlson p. The ambiguity can be located with certain predicates as well: John ate breakfast with a gold fork. The vase broke. Philosophers have noticed that 35 is ambiguous between a type and a token reading: I paid for the same car. But interestingly, the two senses cannot always be accessed felicitously:? I skidded on ice and hit the same car. David Lewis used the idea of a universal grinder reported by Pelletier in his to suggest that we can make sense of mass uses of substantive count nouns — apply the imaginary grinder to, say, three guitars and you can then make sense of: There was guitar all over the floor.

John picked up more guitar than Sarah. Raskolnikov killed Alyona. The tacos at Lalos are delicious. A standard Gricean response to this oddity is that 40 is odd because the second sentence fails to be relevant to the first, and thus uncooperative unless the speaker wants to signal a hidden connection between the tacos and the murder. This seems like a promising start but the injunction to be relevant fails to provide enough theoretical options to explain other transitions between sentences.

For example due to Hobbs : Peter picked the lock. He learned how from Jason. Peter picked the lock and he learned how from Jason. No such inference seems available in 42 , in which the learning to lock pick seems strangely to temporally follow the lock picking. Moreover, much empirical work has been done to show that the manner in which we interpret sentences as connected in a discourse effects how we resolve the reference of anaphora.

For example Smyth : Phil tickled Stanley, and Liz poked him. The colours are light. The feathers are light. The following, however, seems to be zeugmatic:?

The colours and the feathers are light. Numbers exist. Triadic relations exist. Toronto and numbers and triadic relations exist.

For example: Han and Chewbacca used superfluous hair removers. Consider: John and Jane moved a piano. Using conjunction reduction on 52 and 53 we get: John and Jane moved a piano and met for lunch. For example: I saw his duck and swallow under the table and I saw hers too. For example, Atlas argues that the acceptability of the following suggest that negation does not interact scopally with descriptions in the ways we have come to expect: John thinks that the King of France is not bald and Bob thinks so too.

The tests can be used for most of the other types of ambiguity: My superfluous hair remover is not a superfluous hair remover; I need it! Compare canid. As noted by Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk following Cruse , the following two are different in terms of zeugma:? Similarly, from the literature on generics: Bees thrive in warm environments and hence are swarming my porch.

James and Jane want to meet a tall man. Consider, James speaking to Jill and disagreeing over the relevant height required to be tall:? We saw Smith raking the leaves and he did too. For example: We saw Zoe down in the dumps and her therapist did too. Life and the are highways. Think of that next time you are late with a paper… 5. Philosophical Issues There are a few main philosophical issues involved in ambiguity.

For example, consider: Babe Ruth owned a bat. Bats have wings. Babe Ruth owned something with wings. Most people, including myself, upon hearing: She bought a rabbit. The government and the trees have branches.

He kicked the bucket last week and she did too, twice. Bound Anaphora It is often claimed that: John loves his mother. In particular, these alternative sets can have truth conditional effects, for example: Putin only poisons his opponents. Putin only poisons his opponents 78 is falsified by Putin shooting an opponent, 79 is not. Assuming that focal stress is syntactically marked, the LF disambiguates. See Rooth and Herburger for semantic theories of focal stress.

For example, consider an utterance of: I got drunk and I drove home but not in that order. Barnes ed. Aristotle, Metaphysics , W. Ross trans. Atherton, Catherine, The Stoics on Ambiguity.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Atlas, Jay, Bach, Kent, Turner ed. Baker, Mark, Bezuidenhout, Anne, Bittner, Maria, Braun, David, and Theodore Sider, Camp, Elisabeth, Carlson, Greg N. Chomsky, Noam, Cruse, D. Alan, Culicover, P. Jackendoff, Davidson, Donald, Dayal, Veneeta, Doetjes, J. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.

Donnellan, Keith S. Dunbar, George, Fara, Delia Graff, Field, Hartry, Fiengo, Robert and Robert May, Fodor, Jerry, Frege, Gottlob, []. Giannakidou, Anastasia, Gillon, Brendan, Greenough, Patrick, Grice, H. Grimshaw, Jane, Heim, Irene, I aim to avoid an account of musical subtleties that is too coarse-grained which would emerge from an approach suggested by Daniel Dennett , as well as to avoid the bleak conclusion that certain musical subtleties are ineffable Diana Raffman's conclusion ; Dennett's and Raffman's views ultimately result from focusing upon the variations themselves rather than their effects.

Although these terms and relations must be clarified below, I will claim that elements of music indeterminately perceived perform a positive function insofar as they mediate emergent qualities; they only do this as indeterminate, i. Daniel Dennett has suggested that some perceptions which, at first, seem ineffable turn out not to be once they are analyzed effectively.

In his "Quining Qualia," [1] he considers the sound of a guitar's low, open E-string, through a three-step thought experiment. He begins by asking us to imagine simply plucking the string. The sound seems rich, ineffable and unanalyzable. His method, reasonably enough, is to attempt to break-up the sound into parts.

Thus, next, we are asked to play the string's harmonic by placing a finger lightly on the twelfth fret while plucking. Upon hearing this harmonic, "Suddenly a new sound is heard: 'purer' somehow and of course an octave higher. Finally, Dennett believes that when we listen to the open E again, after hearing the harmonic, we will be able to clearly perceive the overtones of the sound, which will render the composite sound that much less ineffable: "On a third open plucking one can hear, with surprising distinctness, the harmonic overtone that was isolated in the second plucking.

The homogeneity and ineffability of the first experience is gone, replaced by a duality as 'directly apprehensible' and clearly describable as that of any chord. The analysis Dennett leads us through is misleading: rather than simply clarifying the original perception, his instructions lead us to a different perception. Dennett himself describes the third perception as being different in the third perception the overtones are more distinct.

He does not seem to realize that in the different steps of his experiment we are listening to the E-string in different ways—and when we do, a change in the structure of the perception occurs. Invoking the early Gestalt psychologists, in his Phenomenology of Perception, [4] Merleau-Ponty maintains that in order to correctly describe perceptions we must describe them in terms of the figure-ground structure the figure consists of the area to which one attends; the ground consists of the other portions of the visual field : "a figure against a background is the most basic sensible given we can have.

The perceptual 'something' is always in the middle of some other thing" PoP, p. Merleau-Ponty explores the relationship between perceptual attention and perceptual structure by considering a Necker Cube figure 1.

Regarding the labeled cube, he writes, "When I focus upon the face ABCD of the cube, this does not mean simply that I make it enter into a state of being clearly seen, but also that I make it count as a figure, and as closer to me than the other face; in short, I organize the cube" PoP, p. Focusing upon different parts of the cube changes the structure of the perception.

Failing to describe that structure accurately leads to a misdescription of the perception. These structural changes also affect other aspects of a perception: in this case, what we take to be the figure determines whether we see the cube as from below or above.

We wouldn't say that these different perceptions of the cube are the same. Returning to Dennett, he believes that the third perception of the E-string is similar enough to the first perception that the third is simply a clarification the first; this is his mistake. He doesn't seem to realize that focusing upon different features of the stimulus changes the structure of what we perceive. In the first hearing of the E-string, the overtones were not the focus of attention this is the typical perception, in the sense mentioned in my introduction ; however, hot on the heels of the isolated perception of the harmonic the second hearing , in the third hearing, the overtones are the focus, they are the figure.

Thus, Dennett's analysis does not merely clarify the first perception; rather, the analysis results in a different perception; it generates a different perceptual structure in which the overtones become the figure.

He does not render the first perception effable. The third perception can be described as clearer than the first but that is not all that distinguishes it from the first.

The important point for our purposes is that the perceptions are different, and this difference can be fruitfully characterized in terms of different ways of perceiving the E-string sound, a different perceptual structure. What Dennett takes himself to be doing is clarifying an aspect of the experience the overtones , which have been there all along.

And he assumes that there is no difference between an experience in which the overtones remain unnoticed and the experience in which they are noticed. We will see that when more specifiable effects of such subtleties are involved, in actual music, this seemingly minor difference between experiences becomes crucial. An instrumentalist or vocalist may perform certain notes that are slightly high or slightly low; two such notes may be accurately categorized as A-sharps while one is slightly higher than the other but not high enough to be categorized in terms of the next highest pitch concept.

Regarding duration, a drummer, vocalist, or pianist, may perform slightly early or late notes. Like the pitch examples, this earliness or lateness is not characterizable by means of music-theoretic concepts, such as eighth note , sixteenth note , or dotted sixteenth note. Two notes exhibiting a timing subtlety may be accurately categorized as eighth notes while one is performed slightly later.

Diana Raffman calls these subtleties "musical nuances"; [5] psychologists and music theorists prefer "expressive variations.

Importantly, philosophers, psychologists, and music theorists who examine these musical subtleties typically do so by characterizing them in the figure role this is not to take the typical musical experience to be the target of investigation. We can see that this is the case by recalling that focusing upon a pitch or duration places it in the figure role; it is common in the relevant articles on music perception to find subjects being asked to attend to pitches or durations in order to report on which variations they are able to detect , or to discriminate between.

For example, in Eric F. Clarke's "The Perception of Expressive Timing in Music," he writes, "The experiments reported in this paper are an attempt to investigate the ability of listeners to detect small-scale timing changes, similar to those in expressive performance, in various kinds of musical sequence. In hearing these nuances, we are hearing differences within—that is, more fine-grained than—the C-pitch [chromatic pitch] and C-interval chromatic interval categories.

Each C-pitch category subsumes many discriminably different pitches, just as each "determinable" color category subsumes many different "determinate" shades; there are many A-naturals and many B-flats, just as there are many reds and many blues.

Under laboratory conditions of minimal uncertainty, the human ear can discriminate anywhere from 20 to pitches to the semitone, depending upon the frequency range and testing procedure employed. Raffman uses pitch terms with subscripts to denote specific pitches; this also indicates that she is characterizing variations as occupying the figure role: a slightly high F-sharp is an "F-sharp 2 ," "F-sharp 4 ," and so on.

She claims that such terms accurately characterize these subtleties; the terms "serve perfectly well for enunciating the [representational] content in question. Once these subtleties are conceived as in the figure role, this leads to the observation that our capacities of discrimination outstrip our capacities of conceptualization. Just as we can discriminate or detect many more color shades than we can conceptualize, so too, we can discriminate many more pitches than we can conceptualize.

According to Raffman, fine-grained pitches are ineffable insofar as we cannot conceptualize them. So far, we have seen that Dennett believes that our subtle perceptions can be clarified conceptually, so they are perfectly effable; we've considered the mistakes in his approach. And as I have indicated, like Dennett, Raffman does not take the import of the figure-ground structure into consideration.

The question to consider now is this: what is the figure and what is the ground in a perception of a slightly high pitch? In order to take the next step, I want to very briefly consider my criticism of Raffman, from my " Musical Musical Nuance. In that essay, I criticize Raffman by highlighting her descriptions of perceptions of musical nuances. Although I don't put it this way in that essay, perceptions of nuances in the figure role are her explananda. Without appealing to the starting point common in phenomenology describing the phenomena under consideration as they show up in ordinary experience , I argue in that essay that the target of an investigation into these musical subtleties should not be the slightly high pitches themselves but rather certain effects of those pitches.

And I am not referring to the effects standardly mentioned by Raffman, music theorists, and psychologists writing on such subtleties, namely, that a performer employs a pitch nuance in order to lead a listener to hear the musical structure as he, the performer, hears it.

Rather, I am referring to nonstructural effects. In that essay, I consider a quotation uncharacteristic of Raffman's book in which she mentions a nonstructural effect—the "brightening" of an interval she subsequently downplays this and other nonstructural effects :. Many fine-grained differences in interval width—indeed the most interesting and important ones, for our purposes—are fully intended expressive features, as when a flutist ever so slightly raises "sharpens" an F-sharp sustained over a D-natural across a modulation from b minor to D major.

I suggest in that essay that one reason to prioritize nonstructural effects is that they constitute one set of reasons that musicians perform slight variations to begin with. A musician strives to perform a slightly high A-natural say because it has an effect in the music, and one kind of effect is nonstructural, such as a "brightening.

Now, the figure-ground structure is useful in clarifying subtleties of pitch and timing because it enables us to further clarify these subtleties, which, importantly, further preempts the ineffability conclusion. In order to begin to see why, it will be instructive to consider Raffman's example in terms of Dennett's three-step analysis. In an initial, typical perception, the figure is the "brightening" analogous to the initial, vague E-string sound ; the slightly high pitch is in the background analogous to the E-string's overtones.

In the second perception, we need a way to imagine focusing our attention toward the slightly high pitch recall that Dennett accomplished this by plucking the harmonic.

Imagine that we are at a rehearsal, and could isolate the flute by simply walking toward the flutist. Upon clearly hearing the flute's slightly high F-sharp, that pitch becomes the figure. We are hearing the pitch as slightly high, so let's follow Raffman and name it, call it an "F-sharp 3. However, having been highlighted, the high F-sharp is still the figure. Clearly, this is a different structure from the first perception; it is a different perception; it sounds different.

Here is the question I have been working up to: how should these initial perceptions be described? Is there a way to describe the slightly raised F-sharp while it is in the background , in the first, typical hearing? If it is correct that musicians often perform such subtleties for the very purpose of generating effects such as a "brightening," then it stands to reason that a salient kind of musical perception would be structured so as to hear the "brightening" as the figure.

If the F-sharp is in the background in that sort of perception, then in order to get clearer about such musical subtleties, we had better find a way of describing it. Publication Type. More Filters. This study demonstrates for the first time the empirical relationship between item ambiguity and the validity of scales on the California Psychological Inventory CPI.

Likert ratings and Goldberg's … Expand. View 1 excerpt, cites background. The prediction of paranoid behavior: comparative validities of obvious vs. This study investigates whether objective self-report measures of personality are better regarded as sources of factual information about the self i.

The prediction of impulsive behavior: comparative validities of obvious vs.