Ambiguity, Ambiguity

Ambiguity is different from vagueness, which arises when the boundaries of meaning are indistinct. Ambiguity is context-dependent: the same linguistic item (be it a word, phrase, or sentence) may be ambiguous in one context and unambiguous in another context. For a word, ambiguity typically refers to an unclear choice between different definitions as may be found in a dictionary. A sentence may be ambiguous due to different ways of parsing the same sequence of words.

An exception to this could include a politician whose "wiggle words" and obfuscation are necessary to gain support from multiple constituents with mutually exclusive conflicting desires from their candidate of choice. Ambiguity is a powerful tool of political science.

Good, for example, can mean useful or functional ( Thats a good hammer ), exemplary ( Shes a good student ), pleasing ( This is good soup ), moral ( a good person versus the lesson to be learned from a story ), "righteous", etc. I have a good daughter is not clear about which sense is intended. The various ways to apply prefixes and suffixes can also create ambiguity (unlockable can mean capable of being unlocked or impossible to lock).

Such ambiguity is generally resolved according to the context. A mishearing of such, based on incorrectly resolved ambiguity, is called a mondegreen.

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.

In writing, the correct insertion or omission of a comma after taxes and the use of "which" can help reduce ambiguity here (for the first meaning, , which is properly used in place of that), or the sentence can be restructured to completely eliminate possible misinterpretation. The devious politician hopes that each constituent will interpret the above 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.

Ambiguity can also be used as a comic device through a genuine intention to confuse, as does Magic: The Gathering's Unhinged Ambiguity, which makes puns with homophones, mispunctuation, and run-ons: Whenever a player plays a spell that counters a spell that has been played [1] or a player plays a spell that comes into play with counters, that player may counter the next spell played [2] or put an additional counter on a permanent that has already been played, but not countered. Songs and poetry often rely on ambiguous words for artistic effect, as in the song title Dont It Make My Brown Eyes Blue (where blue can refer to the color, or to sadness).

An increasing amount of research is concentrating on how people react and respond to ambiguous situations. Much of this focuses on ambiguity tolerance. A number of correlations have been found between an individuals reaction and tolerance to ambiguity and a range of factors.

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 most programming languages, the operations of division and multiplication have equal priority and are executed from left to right. Until the last century, many editorials assumed that multiplication is performed first, for example, ~a/bc~ is interpreted as ~a/(bc)~ ; in this case, the insertion of parentheses is required when translating the formulas to an algorithmic language. 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.In the scientific journal style, the expression ~ s i n \alpha~ meansproduct of variables ~s~ , ~i~ , ~n~ and ~\alpha~ , although in a slideshow, it may mean ~\sin [4] ~.

Then, there is an "unwritten rule": the state is coherent if there are more Greek characters than Latin characters in the argument, and ~n~ photon state if the Latin characters dominate. The ambiguity becomes even worse, if ~|x\rangle~ is used for the states with certain value of the coordinate, and ~|p\rangle~ means the state with certain value of the momentum, which may be used in books on quantum mechanics. Such ambiguities easy lead to confusions, especially if some normalized adimensional, dimensionless variables are used. Expression |1\rangle may mean a state with single photon, or the coherent state with mean amplitude equal to 1, or state with momentum equal to unity, and so on. The reader is supposed to guess from the context.

Source: Wikipedia > Ambiguity