PHI 1101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Railways Act 1921, Syntactic Ambiguity, Lexical Definition

• School: University of Ottawa
• Department: Philosophy
• Course: PHI 1101
• Professor: Sascha Maicher

Document Summary

Clearer thinking, reading, and writing chapter 3 phi1101. Vagueness is when we cannot say if in a word or phrase or sentence, what include or excludes. Ambiguity is when a word, or a phrase,, or a sentence have more than one meaning. Semantic ambiguity is the interpretation of individual words. Example: there are nuts everywhere (cid:314) maybe i came back from a riot (people were nuts) or a hershey"s factory (there were nuts. Grouping ambiguity: it is a special kind of semantic grouping everywhere). (cid:315) It is when it is not clear whether a word is being used to refer to a group collectively or to members of the group individually. Example: secretaries make more money than physicians do (cid:314) the example is true if the speaker refers to secretaries and physicians collectively, since there are many more secretaries than there are physicans. But obviously false if it refers to them individually. (cid:315)