Many words and forms of speech are ambiguous, or can be meant and understood in more than one way.
Sometimes this is obvious, as with the word “bank” (can mean “Bank of America,” or “river bank,” or what you do to a pool ball). Some examples with forms of speech rather than single words:
Flying planes can be dangerous.
Is it the activity of flying which is dangerous, or is it
the planes which are dangerous?
Every child loves a clown.
Does this mean there is one lucky clown
that all the children love? Or does it mean that for each child, there
is a particular clown which he or she loves (but not necessarily the
same clown for each child)? Or does it mean that every child is
favorably disposed to clowns in general?
Other times it’s less obvious, and takes some careful thinking to identify.
I often begin courses by inviting students to think about the concept “mother”: Does this mean the woman who contributed the egg cell that was fertilized and grew into you? Or does it mean the woman in whose uterus you developed and who gave birth to you? Or does it mean the (one or several) women who have legal responsibility for raising you? Often all of these roles are played by the same person, but sometimes they are not. Reflecting on this makes us realize that we can, and sometimes will want and need to, distinguish between different senses or kinds of mothers. For some of them, we may already have labels (“biological mother”). For others, we may have to introduce new labels.
Here’s an argument: This dog is a poodle, and it’s yours, so it’s your poodle.
That sounds like good reasoning. Here’s another: This dog is a pet, and it’s yours, so it’s your pet.
That sounds good too. Here’s a third: This dog is a father, and it’s yours, so it’s your father.
That sounds crazy! What’s gone wrong? Isn’t this the same form of arguemnt as in the previous cases? Reflecting on this, we may recognize a distinction in what’s meant by calling something yours.
That can mean “it belongs to you,” and that’s how we naturally understand many of the preceding claims. But it’s your father
has another meaning, which is what we most naturally hear, namely “this is the creature that fathered you.” The fact that the dog is a father (of something), and that it belongs to you, does not imply that the dog fathered you.
That dog is your father
argument sounds silly, but the same kind of thing can happen in more serious arguments, where the philosophical stakes are higher and the ambiguity is less obvious. For example, this kind of reasoning sounds good: Jack the Ripper was a clever/good murderer. All murderers are criminals. So Jack the Ripper was a clever/good criminal.
But this reasoning doesn’t: Jack the Ripper was a good murderer. All murderers are persons. So Jack the Ripper was a good person.
Perhaps what’s gone wrong here is the same kind of error as in the dog is your father
argument. Some philosophers say this teaches us something important (and controversial) about our concept of “good.”
Another example: Here’s an argument that you should never have bad dreams. First, isn’t it true that in dreams, anything can happen? What could you imagine or want to happen, that it wouldn’t be possible for a dream to deliver? So in dreams, anything you want to happen can happen. But then, since you can have anything happen that you want in your dreams, why shouldn’t all your dreams be blissful and satisfying? We just showed they don’t need to be otherwise.
What do you think about this reasoning? Reflecting on it might teach us important lessons about our concepts of “possible” and “can.”
We’ll encounter many words in our study of philosophy that have multiple meanings. Sometimes words already have multiple meanings in ordinary speech, like “mother” and “yours.” Sometimes words mean one thing in ordinary speech, and have a different, special technical meaning in the mouths of philosophers: some examples you may encounter are “soul,” “materialist,” “realist,” “intentional,” and others. Sometimes even in the mouths of philosophers, words sometimes mean one thing and other times something else. (This is annoying, but it’s how it is.)
Terminology: As discussed in the Philosophical Glossary:
In a philosophical discussion, calling an expression or form of speech “ambiguous” means it has more than one acceptable meaning…
Don’t call an expression “ambiguous” just because different people have different views or theories about it. Different people have different views about what it means to be good, but that wouldn’t yet show that “good” is ambiguous. It would just show that there’s some controversy over what “good” means.
Neither should you call an expression “ambiguous” just because it’s vague, or imprecise, or difficult to know what the correct philosophical theory of it is…
When an argument illegitimately trades on an ambiguity, as the dog is your father
and other examples above do, philosophers say the argument equivocates.
Equivocation is a bad form of argument where some of the key terms can be understood in multiple ways, and the plausibility of the argument depends on reading the term differently in different places. For instance, consider the argument:
There’s a metaphorical sense of the word “snake” in which premise 1 might have some plausibility. But for premise 2 to be plausible, we have to understand the word “snake” there in its literal sense. There’s no single sense of the word “snake” which makes both premises plausible. So this argument does not establish its conclusion: it equivocates on the word “snake.”
Here are some trickier examples of equivocating:
Nature is governed by fixed and unchangeable laws. But every law is the work of some legislator. Therefore, there is some legislator responsible for the governing of Nature.
It’s impossible for two objects to be separated by a vacuum. For if a vacuum is to separate them then nothing can be between them. But if nothing is between them, then they obviously aren’t separated.
One kind of activity philosophers go in for is trying to unpack, or analyze, or investigate, or figure out what definition we’re already understanding some concept to have. If you explain the different senses or kinds of mothers a person can have, that’s the kind of thing you’ll be doing. If you try to explain what goodness is, that’s also what you’re aiming to do. Sometimes these definitions can take a lot of work to identify and properly articulate.
Another kind of activity philosophers can go in for is stipulating that they’re going to use some expression in a specific way, which might not be the way other people use the word, or understand it in other contexts. Sometimes these kinds of official or technical usages can make a discussion easier and more precise.
We’ll see authors doing both of these in our readings, and we’ll be doing both of them ourselves.
For instance, your course may be trying to unpack or analyze how we already understand notions like “has beliefs,” “shouted from fear,” and “acted freely.” It may stipulate a specific way that philosophers understand words like “soul” when exploring such issues.
It’s important not to confuse these. We might talk about “definitions” in both cases — we’re trying to figure out the right definition of “belief,” and so on, versus “this is how we define souls.” But don’t mix these activities up, or lose track of which someone is engaging in when.
An author may stipulate:
In this essay I shall use the word "soul" to mean such-and-such.
As long as these stipulations are clear and consistent and the author consistently holds to them, there is no objection.
When a philosopher asks a question like “What is having a belief?” or “What is death?” on the other hand, she’s not just after some stipulative answer. She wants to know what belief and death really are. She wants to know what we’re thinking and talking about when we think and talk about belief and death. She’s seeking an analysis of our pre-existing concepts.
If it turns out that these concepts are ambiguous, like “mother” and “yours” in the examples above, then she’s seeking an explanation of what their various pre-existing meanings are.
One way we test analyses is by trying to come up with counter-examples.
Say for instance that Professor Smith analyzes death as: having the biological processes of your body stop.
To test her analysis, we try to imagine a case where some creature has died but the biological processes of his body continue, or a case where the creature’s biological processes have stopped but the creature is not yet dead. To do this is to engage in a thought-experiment. A thought-experiment is sort of like an imaginary test case. We’re trying to see whether we can conceive of some situation that’s incompatible with the proposed analysis.
Terminology: The Philosophical Glossary explains the notions of “being incompatible” and related concepts:
When a set of propositions cannot all be simultaneously true, we say that the propositions are inconsistent…
Sometimes we say that a proposition P is incompatible with another proposition Q. This is just another way of saying that the two propositions are inconsistent with each other.
A contradiction is a proposition that’s inconsistent with itself, like
P and not-P.
Philosophical thought-experiments are often fantastical or invoke far-out science fiction. For instance, your course may discuss brain transplants, teletransportation, and/or time-travel. Newcomers to philosophy tend to find all this science fiction bewildering. What relevance can science fiction cases have to real life?
To answer this question, you have to understand the nature of philosophical claims and what’s required to produce a counter-example to them.
Professor Smith is trying to tell us what death is. She’s not just making a claim about actually existing creatures on the planet Earth, and what happens when they die. She’s making a claim which purports to be true of any imaginable creatures anywhere, no matter how bizarre and science-fiction-y they may be.
For assessing such claims, it’s useful to see what imagined possibilities are even consistent with the proposal, and what possibilities aren’t. Professor Smith’s account of what death is may be vulnerable to the following counter-example. Suppose Charles is put into suspended animation, and his body is frozen to near absolute zero. One week later, he is thawed out and revived. Now, during the period where he was frozen, all biological processes in his body had stopped. But it does not seem obviously correct to say that Charles was dead during that period. (Perhaps you think that is the right thing to say; but others do not, so this will at least take some discussion to settle.) Hence, Professor Smith’s account of death is threatened by this example. Charles’ biological processes had stopped but according to some intuitive judgments, he was not dead.
(This counter-example presents something meeting the proposed analysis but appearing not to be appropriately called “dead”; as we said before, other counter-examples may present something we think should be called “dead” but which the proposed analysis doesn’t capture.)
Perhaps it’s not in fact technologically possible to freeze a person and revive him again. This is not important. Professor Smith’s proposed analysis purports to be true of any imaginable creatures anywhere. So if it’s possible even in principle for someone to be frozen, and for his biological processes to stop, without his thereby dying, then Professor Smith’s proposed analysis is wrong. She hasn’t fully and correctly described what death is, for any imaginable creature. This is what our counter-example purports to show.
Here’s another example of science fiction helping us to assess philosophical claims. You may watch a show where Mr Spock uses his Vulcan Death Grip on someone, and they drop to the floor dead. We can understand such a story. It’s coherent and makes sense. There’s nothing in our concept of death which prevents it from being true. Of course, it may not be technologically possible to kill someone just by touching them. But philosophy isn’t concerned with the details of how creatures like us in fact tend to die. Rather, it’s concerned with our understanding and concept of death — it’s inquiring into what this phenomenon we’re talking about amounts to. What it means to die. That’s why philosophy is comfortable appealing to science fiction. If something is part of our very concept of death, then it should hold in every imaginable or possible situation. Even if the science fiction is unrealistic in some ways, it can help explore the boundaries of our concepts. And the lessons we learn by doing that can make a difference to the theories we accept, and thereby make a difference to practical issues and problems we face in the real world.
Contrast that Mr Spock story to this one: At first this guy was dead, but then Spock killed him so then he was alive again.
This story is incoherent. It doesn’t make sense. Our concepts of being dead, killing, and being alive, can’t be put together in that way. Sometimes stories can help us to see these relationships between our concepts.
Several comments.
In offering our counter-examples, we appealed to our intuitive judgments — for example, about whether Charles had died in the first story. We often do this in assessing philosophical claims.
We should recognize and acknowledge that such intuitions aren’t sacrosanct. Sometimes they’re wrong. For example, modern physics forces us to revise many of our intuitions about time, space, and probability.
So it can sometimes happen that we ought to accept a philosophical claim that conflicts with our intuition, and throw out the intuition. But in general, there is a presumption that our pre-theoretical intuitions are true, and we should throw them out only if we have very strong reasons for doing so.
Sometimes we can say Imagine a situation in which…
and go on to
describe a situation which is incoherent or contradictory or otherwise
impossible. For instance, if a philosopher says Every square has four corners,
and you say Not so! Imagine a round square,
you haven’t in
fact described a coherent possibility, and so you haven’t succeeded in
offering a genuine counter-example to his claim.
Sometimes it can be hard to tell whether you’ve described a coherent possibility or not. That’s part of what makes philosophy difficult.
In the first story, Professor Smith might have given us a perfectly good biological test for death: a way of checking whether actual creatures of the sort we’re likely to come across have died. It’s just not a good analysis of death.
In general, we want to distinguish between questions about what it is to be X and questions about how we find out that something is X. Analyzing the difference between two things — say, hydrogen and helium — is different from finding a practical way to tell hydrogen and helium apart. These activities are connected — success in one of them will usually bear on what the options are for the other — but they’re still different activities.
Related to that last comment, consider an amusing anecdote.
A friend once asked me to do something socially unpleasant on her behalf, and I refused. She then called me Jerk.
I asked Why am I a jerk?
to which she responded Exactly, why are you a jerk?
The question I was asking was, what have I done in this situation that counts as being jerky? I doubted that the label was being fairly/correctly applied. Her question, on the other hand, took it as given that I was being jerky, and asked what the reasons were for me getting to be that way.
In philosophical explorations, we’ll often have to keep track of the difference between:
causal/historical questions: What brought something about? What physical or social or other mechanisms produced it? How can we engineer for it to happen / not happen again?
questions about what counts as evidence that something is happening: How can we know or tell when it’s present?
analyses or definitional questions: What constitutes or counts as being a jerk, or being dead? How do we understand these concepts? What do they fundamentally consist in — or as philosophers sometimes say, what is their essential nature?
My friend’s question in the anecdote was clearly in the first category. My own question could be categorized in the third way — how was she understanding “jerk,” what was she taking it to consist in? Or it could be categorized in the second way — given our assumed shared understansing of “jerk,” I was asking her to justify or give evidence that it applied in this case.
We’ve seen that Why? questions can be understood in these various ways. Another form of speech that can also be understood in these various ways is “What makes something die / be a jerk?”
This page tried to explain, and enable you to understand, the following concepts: