Vagueness, Ambiguity, Generality and Definition of terms

Vagueness-
Vagueness in critical thinking is an unclear situation with insufficient
details given.
Vagueness can also refer to the imprecise or unclear use of language. It
can be unintentional or a deliberate rhetorical strategy. For example,
advertisers often use vagueness, such as when they say "new and
improved" without describing what is new and improved.
Vagueness in critical thinking is when a situation is unclear and lacks
sufficient details. For example, if someone is asked to describe a person
they've just met, they might say "He is a tall man, skinny but little fat,
with black pupils".
Many a philosopher has argued that "happiness" is the or one of the
most important elements of human life. Some even go so far as to say
that an action is moral to the degree that it brings about
happiness. Whether we accept such assertions will have much to do
with what is meant by "happiness."

If all that is meant by "happiness" is that momentary good feeling you

can get from eating cake or doing crack, then we will probably be less
inclined to accept happiness as a measuring stick for morality. If we
mean by "happiness" something closer to Aristotle's "eudaimonia" (i.e.,
human flourishing), then we might be more persuaded to accept the
assertion.
When a definition is vague it has no specific meaning for the intended
audience. Here are a few examples of vague definitions from the
goldmine of pseudo-wisdom that is Depak Chopra:

Happiness is a continuation of happenings which are not resisted.

To think is to practice brain chemistry.
A person is a pattern of behavior, of a larger awareness.

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Notice that none of these definitions give us any clarity as to what the
defined term actually means. If you were an outer-space alien and
asked for a definition of "happiness", "thinking", and a "person", your
knowledge would not in any way be improved over your current
position of ignorance.

Vagueness can apply to both individual words like "happenings" as

well as to entire phrases, e.g., "a larger awareness." It should be noted
that Deepak isn't the only entity that employees vagueness as a means
to appear to say something meaningful.

This is also a favourite technique of advertisers. How many times do

we hear "new and improved!" with no description of what is new and
improved? Or that something "'boosts' your immune system"?

Vagueness refers to a lack of clarity in meaning. For example, Go

down the road a ways and then turn right is vague because “a ways”
does not precisely explain how far one should go down the road.
Exercise 1: Explain why these statements are vague.
1. I’ll be back later.
2. We should raise taxes on the wealthy.

In speech or writing, vagueness is the imprecise or unclear use of

language. Contrast this term with clarity and specificity. As an
adjective, the word becomes vague.

Although vagueness often occurs unintentionally, it may also be

employed as a deliberate rhetorical strategy to avoid dealing with an
issue or responding directly to a question. Macagno and Walton note

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that vagueness "can also be introduced for the purpose of allowing the
speaker to redefine the concept he wishes to use"

Vagueness Versus Specificity

"Vague or abstract words can create wrong or confusing meanings in
your receiver's mind. They state a general idea but leave the precise
meaning to the receiver's interpretation..

Varieties of Vagueness

"One characteristic of vagueness...is that it is related to the degree of

formality, or rather informality, of the situation; the less formal the
situation the more vagueness there will be..."

1. Vagueness in Oratory
"The need in oratory of the specific example, either in place of or
immediately following the general statement, cannot be too strongly
urged. Generalizations alone have no persuasive value. And yet this
truth is constantly overlooked by public speakers. How often do we
hear the common criticism of the typically weak, impressionless
address: 'Platitudes and glittering generalities.' In one of George
Ade's Forty Modern Fables a man has certain stock phrases which he
uniformly uses in all discussions pertaining to art, literature, and music;
and the moral is, 'For parlor use, the vague generality is a life-saver.'
But for the public speaker, generalizations are useless for either
imparting or impressing his thought; a single concrete example has far
more convincing and persuasive force."

2. Vagueness in Survey Questions

"Vague words are very common on surveys. A word is vague when it
is not obvious to a respondent what referents (e.g., instances, cases,
examples) fall under the umbrella of the word's intended meaning...For
example, consider the question, 'How many members of your

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household work?' This question has several vague words, most of
which would be missed by the vast majority of respondents. It could be
argued that members, household, and work are all vague words. Who
counts as being a member of the household?...What falls under the
category of household?... What counts as someone
working?...Vagueness is ubiquitous in most survey questions."

3. Ambiguity Versus Vagueness

"The difference between ambiguity and vagueness is a matter of
whether two or more meanings associated with a given phonological
form are distinct (ambiguous), or united as non-distinguished subcases
of a single, more general meaning (vague). A standard example of
ambiguity is bank 'financial institution' vs. bank 'land at river's edge,'
where the meanings are intuitively quite separate; in aunt 'father's
sister' vs. aunt 'mother's sister,' however, the meanings are intuitively
united into one, 'parent's sister.' Thus ambiguity corresponds to
separation, and vagueness to unity, of different meanings."

4. Vagueness in Sentences and Words

"The primary application of 'vague' is to sentences, not to words. But
the vagueness of a sentence does not imply that vagueness of every
constituent word. One vague word is enough. It may be essentially
doubtful whether this is a red shape because it is essentially doubtful
whether this is red, although beyond doubt that it is a shape. The
vagueness of 'This is a red shape' does not imply the vagueness of 'This
is a shape.'"

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Ambiguity-

Ambiguity, use of words that allow alternative interpretations. In

factual, explanatory prose, ambiguity is considered an error
in reasoning or diction; in literary prose or poetry, it often functions to
increase the richness and subtlety of language and to imbue it with a
complexity that expands the literal meaning of the original statement.
Arguments are, of course, made out of language, and language is
always ambiguous to some extent. If you apply the embodied meaning
understanding of the meaning of language, there can never be any
precise equivalence between the meaning of a word, sentence or other
symbol for any two people. Each understands that meaning in relation
to their own body. We do manage to communicate, but only on a more-
or-less basis. If your language means something similar enough to you
and to your audience, you will communicate to an extent. The same
problem applies between you and your past or future self. The words
you wrote in your diary ten years ago may not mean the same now.

However, issues of ambiguity are more striking in some cases than

others, and where they arise more strongly in argument they are more
likely to create misunderstandings and conflicts. There are two types of
problematic ambiguity: ambiguity proper, which is multiple meanings
for the same word or term, and vagueness, which is the lack of clear
boundaries on the application of a term.

Very often, but not always, ambiguities and vagueness are just resolved
by contextual judgement. For example, if I say “I’m going to the bank”
and I’m carrying a chequebook, you don’t think I’m going to sit by the
side of a river; and if I’m carrying a picnic basket, you don’t tend to
think I’m going to have a relaxed picnic inside my local branch of
HBOS. Vagueness also often does not matter: if I tell you I’m going
for “a short walk”, you don’t need to know exactly how many metres I
will be walking – and indeed, nor do I.

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Ambiguity that affects the justification of an argument is known
as equivocation. If you use the same term in a reason and a conclusion,
but don’t realise that they have an importantly different meaning in
each case, the justification of your conclusion is likely to be seriously
undermined. Abstract words are most prone to this: for example, life,
civilised, natural, beautiful, meaning, good, art, and (oddly
enough) logical. Equivocal arguments often have a baggy abstract term
in the middle of them that is in need of a bit of clarification, and if it’s
not clarified needless disputes can ensue.

Terms are ambiguous when they have more than one plausible
interpretation. ("Ambi" means "two"). Ambiguity comes in two
flavours: syntactic and semantic. Semantic ambiguity is when a
word can have two possible meanings. For example, suppose a store
has a sign that says "Watch repairs here." We could interpret this as
"this is a venue in which we can view someone doing repairs" or
"timepieces are repaired here." Generally context sorts outs semantic
ambiguity (but not always).

Syntactic ambiguity is when the sentence structure offers more than

one plausible meaning. For example: I tackled the thief with my
pyjamas on. We could interpret this as meaning the thief was wearing
my pyjamas or that I was wearing pyjamas when I tackled the
thief. Again, context can usually help us sort this out, but not always.

Exercise : Explain why these statements are ambiguous.

1. The new pitcher is great.
2. I am renting the new apartment.
Ambiguity is generally taken to be a property enjoyed by signs that bear
multiple (legitimate) interpretations in a language or, more generally,
some system of signs. ’legitimate’ is a cover term I’m using to nod to
the fact that many signs can, in principle, bear just about any
interpretation. The relativization is to prevent ambiguity in terms like
‘leaped’ which means leaped in English but loved in German. In

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common parlance, the word ‘ambiguity’ is used loosely: often simple
under specificity will suffice for a charge of ambiguity.

There are three varieties of these ambiguities

(1) When either the expression or the name has strictly more than one
meaning…

(2) when by custom we use them so;

(3) when words that have a simple sense taken alone have more than
one meaning in combination; e.g. ‘knowing letters’. For each word,
both ‘knowing’ and ‘letters’, possibly has a single meaning: but both
together have more than one-either that the letters themselves have
knowledge or that someone else has it of them.

Types of Ambiguity
There are different sources and types of ambiguities. To explore these,
however, we will need to adopt some terminology to make clear what
sorts of phenomena we are looking at. Those familiar with some of the
issues in current syntactic theory

1. Lexical Ambiguity
The lexicon contains entries that are homophonous, or even co-spelled,
but differ in meanings and even syntactic categories. ‘Duck’ is both a
verb and a noun as is ‘cover’. ‘Bat’ is a noun with two different
meanings and a verb with at least one meaning. ‘Kick the bucket’ is
arguably ambiguous between one meaning involving dying and one
meaning involving application of foot to bucket.
This sort of ambiguity is often very easy to detect by simple linguistic
reflection, especially when the meanings are wildly distinct such as in
the case of ‘bat’. It can be more difficult, however, when the meanings
are closely related. A classic case is the short word ‘in’. The meaning(s)
of ‘in’, if it is ambiguous, seem to crucially involve a general notion of

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containment, but at a more fine-grained level, the types of containment
can seem wildly distinct.
2. Syntactic Ambiguity
Syntactic ambiguity occurs when there are many LFs that correspond
to the same sentence – assuming we don’t think of sentences as distinct
if their LFs are distinct. This may be the result of scope, movement or
binding, and the level at which the ambiguity is localized can involve
full sentences or phrases. Here are some examples of purportedly
syntactic ambiguities.
A phrase can be ambiguous by corresponding to distinct syntactic
structures. The classic example:
superfluous hair remover
can mean the same as ‘hair remover that is superfluous’ or ‘remover of
hair that is superfluous’. The ambiguity results from the lack of
representation of constituent structure in the English sentence, since it
is unclear if the noun ‘hair remover’ is modified by ‘superfluous’ in its
specifier or if the ‘superfluous hair’ is the specifier of the noun
‘remover’. In current syntax, the phrase would be associated with two
different NPs.
Similarly, a phrase can be ambiguous between an adjunct and an
argument:
John floated the boat between the rocks.
‘between the rocks’ can modify the event of floating, saying where it
happened and thus acts as an adjunct. It can also act as an argument of
‘float’, specifying where the resulting location of the boat on account
of the floating. It can also act as an adjunct modifying ‘the boat’,
helping to specify which boat it is. All of these are readings of (1) and
in each case we find ‘between the rocks’ playing very different roles.
Assuming these roles are dictated by their relations in the relevant LF,
we get three very different LFs that correspond to (1).

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Thematic assignments can be similarly ambiguous at the level of LF
with deleted phrases:
The chicken is ready to eat.
(2) can mean that the chicken is ready to be fed or to be fed to someone
depending on the thematic assignment. In a popular semantic
framework, this is because ‘the chicken’ is assigned agent on one
reading and patient on another. Arguably, these assignments is
corresponds syntactic phenomenon assuming principles that align
thematic role and syntactic position (see Baker 1988, 1997; Williams
1994; and Grimshaw 1990) but the semantic point stands either way.
They result in a clear ambiguity that we may term ‘thematic ambiguity’
for present purposes.
Multiple connectives present similar ambiguities. The following
ambiguity, for example, is borne directly out of failure to tell which
connective has widest scope:
3. Pragmatic Ambiguity
Pragmatics has been claimed to be the study of many different things;
but for our purposes we can focus on two: speech acts and truth
conditional pragmatics.
Speech act theory is complicated and it is not easy to offer a neutral
account of the typology or interpretation of speech acts. But,
intuitively, an utterance (locutionary act) of the sentence ‘The cops are
coming’ can be an assertion, a warning, or an expression of relief. ‘I’m
sorry you were raised so badly’ can be an assertion or an apology. ‘You
want to cook dinner’ can function as a request or as an assertion. ‘Can
you pick me up later?’ can function as a request or a question or both.
And these are just examples of speech acts that are conventionally tied
to these sentence forms. Many, if not all, sentences can be used in
multiple ways.
Interestingly, these ambiguities are not always signaled by the content
of the sentence. For example the following differ in their potential for
use in speech acts though they seem to express similar content:

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1. Can you pass the salt?
2. Are you able to pass the salt?
Some creativity may allow (2) to function as a request but it is very
difficult compared to (1). As such, some theorists have been interested
in trying to determine whether sentence types constrain the speech act
potential of utterances of them.

Generalization

Generalization is a situation when people may miss a lot of details to

make a simple claim. In particular, it is a case when people make a
general judgment on a specific concept. For example, this situation is
common when students at colleges and universities learn about the
concept of generalization. However, the process leads to missing a lot
of details since only important points are covered. As a result, the whole
representation of elements can be changed while critical thinking
develops the understanding of it. Therefore, the generalization process
means summing up general aspects to make a judgment..

The Definition of Generalization Basically, generalization is one of the

writing strategies through which humans extend the characteristic of an
element compared to objective writing. For instance, the element can
be people, animals, events, or other objects. In this case, the
generalization process may lead to vague information. As students
extend knowledge, they make wrong inferences. Hence, generalization
motivates learners to have a simplified representation of learned
concepts. Although it is a problem that causes people to have an
incorrect understanding of things, teachers can solve this issue by
training them to be critical thinkers, providing related knowledge to
real-life situations.

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Then, teachers can explain the problem of generalization to learners by
using real-life examples. For example, the teacher can use related
things with different characteristics in every lesson. In this case, the
person can explain that things that may seem to have similar
characteristics are different. Besides, assuming that comparable objects
have similar traits is a generalization. Therefore, using actual
experience can help in explaining the meaning of generalization.
Moreover, helping learners to be critical thinkers in generalization can
help people to develop. For instance, critical thinking allows persons to
compare some features in different objects. In this case, this training
enables them to become broad and adventurous thinkers, generate
innovative solutions, and rely on reasoning to analyze or evaluate
concepts. Besides, it expands the abilities of a learner to engage his
creativity when analyzing various situations. For example, learning
about a cobra can have the urge to find other snakes with similar traits.
Exploring other snakes can make a learner appreciate the diversity in
their characteristics because of generalization. As a result, students can
avoid generalizing that all snakes have similar characteristics.
Therefore, training persons discourage them from generalizing ideas
and learned things.

Definition

Definition, though often neglected, plays an important role in critical

thinking by helping us make our positions, inquiries, and reasoning
clear.
Every definition has three dimensions: form, action, and content.
The form of a definition is essentially the structure of the definition. An
example of form is definition by synonym, a simple form of definition
in which the word being defined is equal in meaning to one other word.

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Three definitional actions that can be performed with any form of
definition are reporting a meaning, stipulating a meaning,
and advocating a meaning that incorporates a position on an issue.
This chapter focuses on these first two dimensions, form and action.
The third dimension, content, deals with the meaning conveyed by the
definition. The content dimension is enormous because it involves the
definitional content of all subject matter areas, as well as all other areas
of human life. Attention to the content dimension will here be
exemplified only in a discussion of a case of probable equivocation
with the term ‘reliability’.
To the extent possible, a definition should be clear, brief, efficient,
informative, responsive to background information, and easy to
remember and understand. It should be at an appropriate level of
sophistication and difficulty for the situation. It should employ an
appropriate form and have a reasonable amount of vagueness and
specificity. Because so much depends on the situation, and because
these general criteria overlap to some extent, informed cautious
judgment is required.
There has been little recent work with practical application in the area
of definition. I hope that in the future there will be more explicit
attention given to this topic than has been afforded it so far.

2. COMMON FORMS OF DEFINITION

Full-definition forms to be presented are:

(1) classification,
(2) equivalent-expression,
(3) range,
(4) synonym,

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(5) extended-synonym,
(6) antonym, and
(7) operational. Partial-definition forms to be considered are
(8) giving examples, non-examples, and borderline cases (all three
either verbally or ostensively), as well as using the term in a
sentence.There is much to consider in a given context in choosing what
form is more successful in specifying the meaning of a term. It is often
helpful to compare a definition with another definition of the same
word in the same form or in a different form.

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