Episode 28: Ambiguity and Equivocation

In this episode, April explains linguistic ambiguity, equivocation, and the equivocation fallacy. She also tells some really bad jokes.

Episode 28 Show Notes:

Moore, Brooke and Parker, Richard. Critical Thinking. McGraw Hill. 2017.
This is current textbook I use to teach my Critical Reasoning class. Much of what I say here about the types of linguistic ambiguity is taken from this excellent text.

ThoughtCo is a reference site that focuses on educational content. Their articles are written by highly qualified educators and experienced instructors.
https://www.thoughtco.com/polysemy-words-and-meanings-1691642

How many words are there in the English language? This article will tell you:
https://englishlive.ef.com/blog/language-lab/many-words-english-language/

This WhatIs.com article discusses how linguistic ambiguity makes it difficult for artificial intelligence (and of course people) to decode language:
https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/linguistic-ambiguity#:~:text=Linguistic%20ambiguity%20is%20a%20quality%20of%20language%20that,program%20to%20reliably%20decode%20without%20some%20additional%20information

Here's a good discussion of the expectancy violation and humor:
https://thecriticalcomic.com/incongruity-theory/#:~:text=Expectancy%20Violations%20Aristotle%20also%20thought%20humor%20occurred%20with,disappointed%20expectation%20makes%20us%20laugh.%E2%80%9D%20%28ch.%2063%3B%20Morreal%29

Was that really the world's funniest joke? According to this guy, it is:
https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2014/03/07/287250640/what-is-the-funniest-joke-in-the-world

Dr. Itamar Schatz gives a detailed description of equivocation with excellent examples. You should definitely read this:
https://effectiviology.com/equivocation/

Another good explanation  of the equivocation falllacy:
https://examples.yourdictionary.com/equivocation-fallacy-examples.html

What speech is considered "unprotected?" Here you go:
https://legalknowledgebase.com/what-speech-is-illegal-in-the-us

No, of COURSE we don't "torture." Except we do (or did, anyway):
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna9956644

Transcript

Episode 28: Ambiguity and Equivocation

Hi everyone, and welcome to episode 28. We all have at least a basic understanding of language, obviously; but too often we misunderstand each other despite our many years of experience communicating with each other. One of the main reasons it happens is because language is ambiguous, which is defined as “the quality of being open to more than one interpretation.” In fact, the word ambiguity is Latin in origin and means “wandering about.” Words often have more than one meaning, and sometimes it’s unclear which meaning is the intended one. Here’s a hypothetical, although admittedly unlikely, example—let’s say you just got your PhD in Anthropology and your friend says, “So, you’re a philosopher now?”, and you say, “no I’m an anthropologist.” Your friend says, “but you just got a PhD, and that stands for Doctor of Philosophy, so doesn’t that make you a philosopher?” You explain to them that earning a Doctor of Philosophy doesn’t make you a philosopher; the philosophy part of a doctorate comes from the original Greek meaning of the word, which is “love of wisdom.” So what philosophy means in the context of a PhD is that you loved anthropology so much that you studied and studied until you were full of pearls of wisdom…about anthropology. If you had earned a PhD in the field of Philosophy, then your friend could call you a philosopher. Continuing with this silly but illustrative example, let’s say you then take that doctorate and get yourself a nice faculty position at a university, it would be perfectly acceptable for your colleagues and students to refer to you as Dr.  But the term Doctor as it’s used in this context should NOT be confused with a Medical Doctor, so if you have a PhD in Anthropology and someone yells, “Is there a doctor in the house?” It would be unwise for you to raise your hand and say, “I’m a doctor.” That could turn out very badly for someone who is having a medical emergency. Are you a doctor? Sure. Could you remove an appendix? Probably not.

 Ambiguity like this could be used accidentally or deliberately, and if deliberate, could be used as humor, or it could be used to intentionally deceive. One of the ways that ambiguity occurs in persuasion is by exploiting these multiple meanings of words and phrases to deliberately confuse someone. That is known as the equivocation fallacy. In this episode we’re going to look at linguistic ambiguity in general, then we will focus specifically on equivocation and the equivocation fallacy. Ok, let’s get started.

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 As I said, language is ambiguous by nature. According to the reference site ThoughtCo, the term for words having more than one meaning is “polysemy,” and a word that falls into this category is called a “polyseme.” Up to 40% of all words in the English language are polysemes; that’s a lot of words-----The website English Live says that while it’s hard to determine exactly how many words there are in English, there are at least a million, with around 170,000 of them in current use. So if we assume that 40 percent of common words have more than one meaning, that’s around 68,000 words. Not only do those words have multiple meanings when you look them up in the dictionary, but each of us may have personal meanings and associations with words. I always use the word “cat” to explain this to my students. We talk about the dictionary definition, also called the denotative definition, of the word, which is “a domestic species of a small carnivorous mammal.” Then we talk about each person’s personal definition of the word cat, also known as the connotative meaning of the word, and I get all kinds of descriptions, some evoking sweet, fluffy, loving balls of fur, while others are not so kind, instead describing mean, annoying, allergy-inducing, and other negative catlike traits. So there may be as many connotative definitions of the word cat floating around out there as there are people! And that’s just one word that evokes so many different definitions! Right away you can begin to see the problem with ambiguity. But there are lots of other ways in which words are ambiguous. One of those ways is called semantic ambiguity. This is when someone uses a word that has more than one meaning without enough information to help you understand which meaning they’re talking about. So for instance, if someone says to you—“Julia is renting her house.” Based on that sentence, you might think that Julia is renting the house she lives in, but she doesn’t own it. But maybe Julia owns a house that she’s renting to someone else to live in. Those are two entirely different interpretations of the very same words, and without more information, you wouldn’t know which one the person meant. How about this one, “My uncle Dave doesn’t use glasses.” Does that mean that he doesn’t use glasses to see with, or that he drinks milk right out of the carton? Again, two very different messages using the same words, so without more context either interpretation might be correct.

There’s another kind of ambiguity called “grouping ambiguity.” This occurs when it’s not clear whether a word or phrase is being used to refer to a group collectively or to individual members of that group. Here’s a real-life example: At the College of Southern Nevada, where I am a faculty member, the non-instructional staff, like office assistants and maintenance workers, make more money than the professors do. Now you might think that sounds like your kind of place! Or, that it doesn’t sound right at all. Here’s more context so you can understand why what I just said is both true, and false; if you compared the salary of an individual faculty member with the salary of an individual staff member, it’s very likely that the faculty member makes more money than the staff member, which would make the claim false. However, there are about 1600 faculty members, who make an average salary of around $76000/year; but there are 2400 non faculty employees who make an average of about 61,300/year. Now, if you take each group as a whole, the non-faculty members make, in total, about 27 million dollars a year more than the faculty, simply due to the fact that there are so many more of them. So the statement that they make more money is true, but only as a group, not individually. And if that information is left out, it could obviously be very confusing.

Then there’s something called syntactic ambiguity. Syntax has to do with the order of words, so this kind of ambiguity is based on the structure of the sentence, the way it’s phrased. Here are a couple of examples: 

I saw the men with binoculars. (Did I see the men by looking through binoculars, or did I see some men who HAD binoculars? Unclear…) Here’s another one:

There’s someone in the bed next to me. (Is there a bed next to me with someone lying in it, or is someone lying next to me in the same bed? Well, sounds like that situation could be either good, or not so good, depending on who that person is lying next to me…

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 Ok, so now you know the different kinds of linguistic ambiguity. Most of the examples I gave could be chalked up to poor or lazy word choices, and frankly we are all guilty of those things from time to time. It’s easy to clear up what you meant by adding or changing a few words to provide more context. But sometimes ambiguity is not accidental, it’s used deliberately. One of the reasons for deliberate ambiguity is to be funny. Lots of humor springs from something called an “expectancy violation.” Nathan Wilson, who has a PhD in Communication and Rhetoric but has also done stand-up comedy, writes a blog called The Critical Comic. In it he mentions that this kind of humor has been used for millennia; even Aristotle and Cicero were aware of it.  The first part of the joke, which is the set-up, leads the audience to expect one thing, but then in the punch line something entirely different happens (so it violates the audience’s expectations). Here’s an example: Two people are talking, the first Person says, “My dog has no nose!” The other person says, “Well, how does he smell?” The first person says, “He smells terrible.” Ok, that’s not really that funny of a joke, although your five-year old might think it is, but it does illustrate how ambiguity is used in humor. The relevant word here is “smell.” One of the people uses the word to mean the dog’s act of sensing odor, but the other person’s definition has to do with the odor that’s emanating from the dog. The difference between those two meanings is the source of the humor.

Here's another joke that uses ambiguity as humor: Two men go hunting in the woods and one of them collapses. He doesn’t seem to be breathing and his eyes are glazed. The other hunter calls 911 and says, “O My god I think my friend is dead. What should I do?” The 911 operator says, “Calm down, I can help. First, let’s make sure he’s dead.” There is silence, then the operator hears a loud shot. The guy comes back on the phone and says, “Ok. Now what?” 

Funny? Not funny? Whatever you think about it, you might be surprised to learn that this was determined to be the world’s funniest joke by humor researcher Richard Wiseman. I’ll post a link to an article that talks about how he came to that conclusion in the show notes. Anyway, the phrase being used differently by the two people in this joke is “make sure he’s dead.” The 911 operator meant for the guy to look for signs that the man who collapsed was still alive; the other man unfortunately thought the operator meant to, I don’t know, put him out of his misery or something? Anyway, when semantic ambiguity is used in humor, it’s done in a way that makes both meanings obvious in the punch line, and we laugh because we really should have seen that coming.

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 Sometimes, though, linguistic ambiguity is used deliberately and stealthily for…reasons, and this is where equivocation comes in. According to the website Effectiviology, equivocation is the deliberate use of vague or ambiguous language. Dr. Itamar Schatz, who runs the website, says, and I quote: “equivocation involves the intentional use of imprecise language, together with other forms of misleading or confusing forms of communication, such as statements that are ambiguous, contradictory, tangential, or evasive.” Have you ever been deliberately vague with someone who is obviously trying to dig into your personal life with the questions they’re asking? I certainly have, and sometimes a deliberately ambiguous answer is just the thing to shut down their line of questioning. In that case, the use of equivocation might be called for. However, if the answer to a question is something that people really should know, like a politician’s stance on an issue, a vague or noncommittal response is both common and unhelpful. Politicians often don’t want to take a stand in case their answers might end up reflecting badly on them later, or if they change their mind, they would be seen as a flip-flopper. Better, apparently, to be generally vague about most things while still trying to appeal to your base.

 The equivocation fallacy, however, occurs when someone deliberately but surreptitiously shifts between the different meanings of a word or phrase to prove or support their claim during an argument. This is a clever persuasive tactic that can confuse the listener to the point they may buy into the conclusion without realizing they’ve been misled. Just like equivocation itself, the equivocation fallacy is very popular in the political arena. If you’re old enough, you might remember when Bill Clinton said “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, these allegations are false.” The term at the heart of this fallacy is “sexual relations.” President Clinton was of course well aware of his behavior with Monica Lewinsky, but was using a specific definition of the term “sexual relations” to mean “full-on sexual intercourse,” and in that sense, ok, that didn’t happen. But many people (if not most) would classify oral sex as a form of sexual relations, so... Clinton was guilty not only of fooling around with an intern but of using the equivocation fallacy to try to prove that he did not have “sexual relations” with her.

 And in 2006, during the war with Iraq, there was a huge outcry about the tactics used by the US military and CIA to obtain information from suspected terrorists during interrogation; so Congress proposed a ban on torture. President George Bush was adamant when he pushed back, saying “We do not torture.” Well, turns out that his definition of torture did not include certain interrogation techniques that the American public was initially unaware of, things like waterboarding and something called “rectal feeding (that just sounds…horrible).” Since Bush knew full well that those things were going on, yet left them out of his torture definition, he was guilty of the equivocation fallacy. 

 There are an unending number of examples of politicians committing this fallacy, those are only two. However, lest you think that all this proves is that politicians are jerks, guess what? We are all jerks! It’s very likely you have committed this same fallacy many times. Don’t think so? How about this example:

 You tell your extended family that you’re not going to be home for Christmas this year, and you’re very sad that you won’t be able to attend the standard Christmas Day family dinner at Uncle George’s house. In reality, you WILL be home for Christmas Day; you’re actually leaving the day after Christmas. But hey, you’ve justified it because the word “Christmas” as you’re using it is ambiguous—what exactly constitutes “Christmas?” Only December 25th? Does it include the days before or after Christmas? The entire Christmas season, which could frankly be anytime between Thanksgiving and New Years? Since you’re not specific, and you don’t provide more information than that, you are now free to spend your Christmas sitting on the couch with your cat binge-watching the new season of The Crown. Just so you know…at that Christmas dinner, your cousins will be talking about you behind your back. Depending on your relationship with those people, you might think it’s worth it.

 Ok, if you haven’t done that one, you’ve done something similar. And, very likely, so have the people around you. Here's another hypothetical example: let’s say that you and an acquaintance are discussing Alex Jones’ being ordered to pay almost a billion dollars to some of the families of the children and teachers murdered in the Sandy Hook mass shooting. The person you’re talking to is making this argument: “The First Amendment says Americans have freedom of speech; Alex Jones should be able to say those things, even if you don’t agree with them. After all, they’re just words.” Well, your friend is conflating the idea of “freedom to say whatever you want” with freedom of speech as it applies to the First Amendment, but those aren’t the same thing. The latter is specific as to how much the United States government can censor or otherwise interfere with the expression of our opinions and beliefs. So, sure, a lot of what comes out of Alex Jones’ mouth is protected speech according to the First Amendment. BUT---that doesn’t mean that there are NO restrictions on speech.  In fact, nine types of speech have been determined to be “unprotected”—those are obscenity, fighting words, defamation, child pornography, perjury, blackmail, Incitement to imminent lawless action, and true threats. The words Alex Jones spoke over the course of many years about the victims of Sandy Hook were determined to fall into the category of defamation, which is NOT protected speech; and the consequences of ruining those people’s lives and reputations were determined by a jury to be measured in the hundreds of millions of dollars. So no, you can’t just say whatever you want without consequences, and if your friend knows that but uses that argument anyway, they’re guilty of the equivocation fallacy. As a Communication professor, I know that words are extremely important, so saying “after all, they’re just words” is incredibly obtuse.

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 Ok, what have we learned? Linguistic ambiguity is often a source of confusion and misunderstanding, it can be either accidental or deliberate, and while often problematic, it isn’t necessarily a bad thing depending on how and why it’s being used. It might be handy for certain things like telling a joke, or keeping nosy people from knowing your business. But when it’s deliberately used to win an argument by conflating the meanings of words, that’s when it becomes a fallacy. Just like all the other fallacies we’ve discussed over the years, we can be swept up in an argument and not even realize that we’re being subjected to them-- or even worse, using them ourselves to try and get our way. 

 So what can we do to be better at avoiding equivocation in our interactions with others? Itamar Schatz says we need to determine if and why equivocation is being used--For instance, if you ask someone a legitimate question in good faith and their response really doesn’t answer that question (it’s vague or otherwise unclear), you first need to determine if the person is indeed being hesitant or unwilling to answer the question. Remember, sometimes equivocation is completely reasonable, so depending on the circumstances it might be a good idea to drop that line of questioning. Or they might not be equivocating, just having some difficulty thinking through and verbalizing their answer. In that case you might want to direct the conversation in a way that helps them explain themselves more clearly. But if the person seems to be deliberately using a word or phrase that you realize has two or more different meanings and they are vacillating between those meanings, go ahead and point that out and ask them to clarify which meaning they are referring to. You might come to find out they weren’t aware they were doing it, like your friend who is defending Alex Jones might NOT know that the First Amendment doesn’t protect every single thing that could come out of someone’s mouth, so explaining that to them could be helpful, and you never know, they might be willing to listen and learn. Or they might be unwilling to admit they were equivocating and try to deflect further, in which case, you’ve learned something about your friend.

 How can we personally avoid being guilty of equivocation? Obviously you should always try to be as unambiguous as possible, using words and phrases that can really only be interpreted one way, or including enough context to make sure you’re being clear. Use language that’s easy for the person you’re talking to to understand, and avoid words that are unnecessarily technical or jargon-y. And try to stick to the same meaning of a word, term, or phrase you use throughout an argument, especially if you’re using it to help prove your point. Of course all of this requires thoughtfulness and caring about the messages we send. Is it easy? I can’t speak for you, but it’s not easy for me, and one of the reasons I keep doing this podcast is because I need to continually remind myself of these things. So this was a good lesson for me, and I hope it was for you as well.

And that’s it for this episode. Go out there and use this information throughout your day to help you think it through.