Of all the sources of faulty and misleading reasoning, ambiguity is the
most fruitful and the most inclusive.
It springs from the facts that words, except those which are almost
technically specific, are constantly used in more than one sense, and
that a great many of the words which we use in everyday life are
essentially vague in meaning. Such common words as "liberty," "right,"
"gentleman," "better," "classic," "honor," and innumerable others each
need a treatise for any thorough definition; and then the definition, if
complete, would be largely a tabulation of perfectly proper senses in
which the words can be used, or a list of the ways in which different
people have used them. Besides this notorious vagueness of many common
words, a good many words, as I have already shown (p. 54), have two or
more distinct and definable meanings.
Strictly speaking, the ambiguity does not inhere in the word itself, but
rather in its use in an assertion, since ambiguity can arise only when
we are making an assertion. It has been defined as "the neglect of
distinctions in the meaning of terms, when these distinctions are
important for the given occasion."[48] Suppose, for example, you are
arguing against a certain improvement in a college dormitory, on the
ground that it makes for luxury: clearly "luxury" is a word that may
mean one thing to you, and another to half of your audience.
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