Polysemy of Ambiguity

This time I visited the entry on Ambiguity in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Sennet, Adam, "Ambiguity", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2023 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2023/entries/ambiguity/>.

"Frege worried about the phenomenon enough to counsel against allowing any multiplicities of sense in a perfect language."

This clearly shows that Frege did not understand what language is for. Hence, his idea of a "perfect language" is not worth listening to.

The real world provides a vast variety of objects and the ways those objects can be combined to form complex scenes. Not only that but different people find different pieces of the same scene relevant. Having a unique word or phrase for each object or scene or their part is unaffordable. Intelligence and language, as its product, follow a different path of grouping objects under the same word. Further, the same word may be reused to address a different group of objects if it is sufficiently distant semantically to avoid confusion.

"the infamous case of Smith vs. United States in which the law stipulated that a weapon used in the main question was whether the law proscribing penalties for using a firearm in committing a crime applied to weapons used as items of exchange for drugs."

What a lovely example! Intelligence is about viewing each phenomenon from multiple points of view. Laws would be so much better if they were flexible enough to be intelligent.

"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."

Conventionalized may be a better term. Yes, just about anything that can be touched by intelligence may serve as a symbol and as such stand for just about anything else. But if I use that symbol to stand for something I need to know that my listeners or readers share the convention about that "standing for". "Legitimate" is more about the assignment of meaning to a sign. "Convention" is more about sharing the assignment.

"theorists have found it useful to divide the phenomenon of ambiguity from other phenomena (e.g., underspecification, vagueness, context sensitivity)."

I generally agree with this but I have to point that apart from vagueness, underspecification and context sensitivity are tightly involved in the treatment of ambiguity as I see it.

"First, ambiguity makes vivid some of the differences between formal languages and natural languages and presents demands on the usage of the former to provide representations of the latter. Second, ambiguity can have a deleterious effect on our ability to determine the validity of arguments in natural language on account of possible equivocation. Third, ambiguity in art can intentionally (or unintentionally) increase the interest in a work of art by refusing to allow easy categorization and interpretation. Fourth, ambiguity in the statement of the law can undermine their applicability and our ability to obey them. Finally, ambiguity resolution is an important feature of our cognitive understanding and interpretative abilities. Studying ambiguity and how we resolve it in practice can give us insight into both thought and interpretation."

It is worth mentioning here that, unlike linguists and philosophers of language, humans use natural languages for a long time and with great success. This implies that even though implicitly they have a mechanism for ambiguity resolution. All the concerns mentioned above stem from the fact that the mechanism is not explicit.

"This leaves a range of potential objects: utterances, utterances relative to a context, sentences, sentences relative to a context, discourses, inscriptions…. The differences aren’t trivial: a written down sentence corresponds to many possible ways of being uttered in which features such as prosody can prevent certain meanings that the written down sentence seems capable of enjoying. Two written utterances may sound the same (if they contain words that sound alike) without being spelt alike (if the words aren’t co-spelled) thus resulting in phonological ambiguity without corresponding orthographic ambiguity."

"we may choose to represent the meaning of ‘bank’ disjunctively or we may choose to individuate ‘bank’ as multiple lexical items that simply sound and look alike"

If a word looks and sounds the same then it's the same word. Humans know how to disambiguate words that look the same when they read them or words that sound the same when they hear them. Most often, the explanation is that humans use context. Obviously, philosophers know implicitly how to do that but they cannot explain the process explicitly.

"There are clearly words that are ambiguous but not (obviously) vague: ‘bat’ is not vague but it is ambiguous. ‘Is bald’ looks to be vague but not ambiguous."

The word "bald" is perfectly polysemous. It is enough to look it up in a dictionary.

"A general hallmark of vagueness is that it involves borderline cases: possible cases that are neither clearly in the extension of the vague term nor clearly not in its extension. An alternative characterization involves fuzzy boundaries rather than borderline cases."

I agree with that take on vagueness but I want to attract everyone's attention to the "borderlines" and "boundaries". Where are they drawn and what do they separate? I claim that those are the delimiters of the ranges of comparable properties - the core components of intelligence, readily available to be used by language.

"Context sensitivity is (potential) variability in content due purely to changes in the context of utterance without a change in the convention of word usage."

There are many definitions of context and at least two conceptually different contexts. The one I mostly rely on belongs to the realm of objects (viewed broadly as anything worth talking about). The other context is textual and with respect to this type of context we need to differentiate words and phrases as objects and what they stand for - the first type of context.

"if I tell you that I am going to visit my aunt, I underspecify whether it is my mother’s sister or my father’s sister whom I am going to go visit. Nothing follows about the univocality or ambiguity of ‘aunt’. It simply means ‘aunt’ is true of things that are female siblings of your parent."

The word "key" is a polysemous word with its meaning ambiguous until I provide enough context for disambiguation. That is why we may consider "polysemous", "ambiguous", and "underspecified" as synonyms.

"One difficult phenomenon to classify is transference of sense or reference (see Nunberg, Ward). When you say ‘I am parked on G St.’, you presumably manage to refer to the car rather than yourself. Similarly, ‘I am traditionally allowed a final supper’ said by a prisoner is not about himself (there are no traditions regarding him). The mechanics of reference transfer are mysterious, and the interaction of transferred terms with the syntax is a matter of some dispute."

Mysterious? But I saw above that "signs can, in principle, bear just about any interpretation". The question is how to resolve such references. Again, implicitly we know and use the mechanism regularly, but philosophers struggle to explain this mechanism explicitly.

Consider taking a look at my post Reference Resolution for NLU.

"‘My uncle wonders if I am parked where the bank begins’ is sense-general, ambiguous, context-sensitive, vague and it involves reference-transfer."

Another lovely example! Such sentences demonstrate the true beauty of natural languages and their intelligent nature.

"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."

If a word may have more than one meaning we should follow Firth's advice, "You will know a word by the company it keeps". Take the word "key", it may refer to ranges of different properties - locking tool, programming term, voice level, etc. The word "high" is also polysemous, it may refer to the height, concentration, voice level, etc. If we consider the phrase "high key" and follow Firth's advice, both words impose coherence constraints on each other, they both have to apply to the same phenomenon. Performing a simple set intersection operation or mutual filtering if you will, we quickly narrow down the set of possible "meanings".

The above mechanism illustrates that words are ambiguous when they are viewed in isolation. But in the "company" they get "specified".

"Syntactic Ambiguity

superfluous hair remover

can mean the same as ‘hair remover that is superfluous’ or ‘remover of hair that is superfluous’."

"Someone is in a car accident every 10 seconds."

It is easy to interpret the above phrases as intended by their writers. However, it is also possible to interpret them differently. Is it possible for any phrase imaginable?

The Exact Instructions Challenge (

demonstrates one extreme case of pareidolia when we may find meaning where none was intended. In that case, the father found an unintended meaning in the instructions provided with a different meaning in mind.

"the following differ in their potential for use in speech acts though they seem to express similar content:

Can you pass the salt?

Are you able to pass the salt?"

Note that not every question starting with "can you" can be considered as a request. Therefore, we may consider those cases that can to be the symbols for which there is a convention about their additional load as requests.

"Presuppositional Ambiguity

Maria solved the problem too.

It’s natural on first read to think that (20) carries the presupposition that someone else solved the problem. But that need not be the case: it may presuppose that Maria solved the problem as well as having done something else"

Please note that we can view this example as another underspecification case. Given additional relevant context we can easily disambiguate the exact meaning.

"Kent Bach (1982) explores the intriguing case of:

I love you too.

This can mean (at least) one of four distinct things:

I love you (just like you love me)

I love you (just like someone else does)

I love you (and I love someone else)

I love you (as well as bearing some other relationship (i.e. admiring) to you)"

Another lovely example! And another underspecification case.

"An interesting case of ambiguity comes from ellipsis. The following is clearly ambiguous:

John loves his mother and Bill does too."

The use of ellipsis makes language more efficient. It is again based on conventions. We use pronouns instead of nouns, auxiliary verbs instead of action ones, words like this, then, there instead of specific content words because we know that listeners have enough context and know the disambiguation mechanism to understand us correctly. Unless we want to mislead them or they want to play with us.

In the cases of honest confusion, listeners have the option to ask clarifying questions.

"‘light’ is a predicate that can enjoy the same meaning as either ‘not dark’ or ‘not heavy’.

The colours are light.

The feathers are light."

See the "high key" example above.

"Many arguments look persuasive but fail on closer inspection on account of structural and/or lexical ambiguity. For example, consider:

Babe Ruth owned a bat.

Bats have wings.

Babe Ruth owned something with wings.

The argument looks valid and the premises seem true, on at least one reading, but the conclusion doesn’t follow."

This overexaggerated example obviously tries to attract attention to the cases where this fallacy will be less obvious. But again, if each reference is resolved properly, the fallacy will fall apart.

"Grice (1975) counsels a methodological principle: ‘Senses are not to be multiplied beyond necessity’."

On the one hand. On the other, the reuse of words having some previous meaning may shed additional light on a new phenomenon referred to by that word. Let's return to the word "bald" in its meaning "hairless". Now let's use it in a new meaning, "His statement was bald." We characterize the statement as "lacking something". And the Merriam-Webster Dictionary agrees with that (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bald) - "lacking adornment or amplification."

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Polysemy, ambiguity, or underspecification - call it as you like but it is an intentional feature of natural languages with a corresponding resolution mechanism relying on context. Instead of considering them as assisting tools, philosophers view polysemy and context-dependence of natural languages as problems. Let me state it unambiguously - they are not!