Thursday, December 15, 2022

Examples Of Linguistic Ambiguity

It is an easily demonstrable logical fact that there is no inherent meaning to words.  Whatever truths there are are true and every concept is the concept that it is no matter what symbols and sounds are assigned to them, but every linguistic system has intrinsically random starting points and even millennia of linguistic conventions do not change the fact that the only things words mean are what the user intends by them--if language is arbitrary, and inescapably so, then there is no such thing as a meaning of a sound or a set of characters that is fixed or inherent.  Words do have objective meaning: they objectively mean whatever the speaker or writer means by them!  Someone can use language inconsistently and thus be a horrible communicator in ways that might reflects their incoherent worldview, and not trying to match up one's intended meaning with what other people seem to mean by words hinders effective communication, but the words of others are ambiguous.

This goes far beyond what many people will ever realize regarding language, and still there are examples of just how ambiguous even casual language can be.  Not only are there sentences used by people all the time that lack the precision or completeness that some might think they have, all while somewhat conveying the right idea, but there are also sentences that actually lack practically any clarity about which of multiple things is being communicated.  Consider the following question: "Do you see the girl with the telescope?"  Anyone could mean anything by their words and you would never know exactly what the intended meaning of words are with absolute certainty unless they are your own words (or unless you are omniscient), but there are two specific things this sentence could mean within conventional English norms.  This question might be asking if someone used a telescope to see a girl or if someone has noticed a girl holding or using a telescope.  Which of these two options is correct or even more likely?

From this one sentence alone, it is utterly impossible to decipher which of the two is even probably meant.  If this was spoken in the context of two people interacting in person, there would be visual clues that could help point towards one intended meaning or the other, but in written form, it is literally impossible for either meaning to be more probable than the other.  Yes, people can use words to further explain their words.  This is always an option for anyone who can speak or write.  Words are all that humans have to at least try to communicate anything deeper or more abstract than outward behaviors.  In actuality, even stares, glances, gestures, and other physical actions rely on prior linguistic familiarity between people in many cases for them to even come to realize what the other person likely means by their motions or facial expressions.  Still, the words of others are hopelessly ambiguous to some extent universally and to a greater extent in particular sentences like the previous example.

Another example, though, is the sentence "She fed her cat food."  Is this referring to a woman feeding another female human cat food or feeding pet food to her own cat?  Again, you could never know just from the words themselves.  Unlike the previous example, this is a past tense statement rather than a present tense question, so there would be even fewer non-linguistic clues as to the meaning if this sentence came up in an in-person conversation.  One could not necessarily just point to or see the event being described unless it had just happened in view of the witnesses.  The gulf between minds also prevents someone from just knowing what other people intend by their words.  What a person means here, without further verbal elaboration or direct observation of the event in question, is hopelessly ambiguous, though of course the inability to know what other minds are specifically thinking prevents one from truly knowing what someone means even with these additional interpretive aids.

These two simple sentences alone show that the uncertainty of language is not something that only rationalists have to encounter; it is already present in everyday conversations and writings even if non-rationalists completely ignore it or assume that most uses of language are not really ambiguous.  Language is totally secondary at best to logic, concepts, introspection, and other things like morality and scientific laws that it can refer to, but the need to communicate far more precisely with others than gestures, looks, and actions could ever allow for makes language an integral part of social life.  Those who do not recognize the ambiguity of language used by other people are more likely to conflate words with the concepts and truths they refer to, misunderstand other people's statements (though one can never know for sure what other people mean by their words, everyone can know what they seem to mean, but this takes effort beyond what many are willing to invest), and ignore truths at the heart of the very nature of language.  Neither knowledge of truth nor usefulness comes from this.

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