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CONWAY DAVID A. AND RONALD MUNSON (1997) The Elements of Reasoning, Wadsworth Publishing Company, New York.
PIRIE, MADSEN (2006)(2015) How To Win Every Argument, Bloomsbury, London.
WALTON, DOUGLAS (1996) ‘Informal Fallacy’, in Robert Audi, (ed), The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Examples from Pirie
I met the ambassador riding his horse. He was snorting and steaming, so I gave him a lump of sugar.' (38)
'FOR SALE: Car by elderly lady with new body and spare tyre. (38)
Note
I now just realize this is how 'tyre' is spelled in British English. I wrote my MPhil and PhD theses with British English, but 'tyre' is still new to me.
(Canadian and American English is 'tire')
Amphiboly is the fallacy of ambiguous construction. (37)
The fallacy occurs often when one fails to consider alternate readings. (38)
This could be due to mistakes in punctuation and grammar.
He states that astrology makes good use of amphiboly as do fortune tellers and a prophet to 'hedge his bets' (38) and 'have it both ways. (38)
This would of course be a false prophet. A true prophet, receiving actual information from God would do no such thing and to hedge bets would risk death in error. Deuteronomy 13 and 18 both stating a false prophet within the Old Testament, Mosaic Law should be put to death.
In the New Testament context a false prophet is to be exposed as such by the Church. This minus the Mosaic Law. 2 Peter (false prophets and false teachers) and Jude (false teachers) are two notable New Testament books to expose false religionists. Jesus also mentioned false Christs and false prophets in Matthew 24.
I am not implying or indicating that all prophets use amphiboly, although to Pirie's credit, he points out a tool that can be used by false religionists.
'The Elements' text is useful considering vagueness and ambiguity in writing arguments.
Vagueness described as a term's lack of precision (176) and ambiguity allows for various possible meanings, each which may be precise. (176).
In Cambridge, Amphiboly is called '(double arrangement)' as traditional fallacy from Aristotle's list. (376). It is the use of 'syntactically ambiguous sentences.' (376).
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