Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
Many terms are ambiguous. Each use of an ambiguous term should be preceded by the definition, suitable for a specific case. Just like Ludwig Wittgenstein states in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: "... Only in the context of a proposition has a name meaning." [7] A highly confusing term is gain. For example, the sentence "the gain of a system ...
The ambiguity arises because the reader may not be certain as to which definition is intended by the editor. In such cases, always provide sufficient context or explanation to make it clear to any reader which definition is intended. In some cases wording can be ambiguous although the words are not.
Ambiguity occurs when a single word or phrase may be interpreted in two or more ways. As law frequently involves lengthy, complex texts, ambiguity is common. Thus, courts have evolved various doctrines for dealing with cases in which legal texts are ambiguous.
[citation needed] The term parse forest refers to the collection of all possible syntactic structures, known as parse trees, that can represent the ambiguous sentence's meanings. [2] [3] The task of clarifying which meaning is actually intended from among the possibilities is known as syntactic disambiguation. [4]
In linguistics, an expression is semantically ambiguous when it can have multiple meanings. The higher the number of synonyms a word has, the higher the degree of ambiguity. [ 1 ] Like other kinds of ambiguity , semantic ambiguities are often clarified by context or by prosody .
In computer science, an ambiguous grammar is a context-free grammar for which there exists a string that can have more than one leftmost derivation or parse tree. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] Every non-empty context-free language admits an ambiguous grammar by introducing e.g. a duplicate rule.
This is due to the fact that many terms in natural language have ambiguous or vague meanings. [23] [12] [8] [1] Ambiguous terms have several meanings while vague terms have an unclear meaning. Fallacies of ambiguity often result in merely verbal disputes: the arguing parties have different topics in mind and thereby talk past each other without ...
Equivocation in a syllogism (a chain of reasoning) produces a fallacy of four terms (quaternio terminorum). Below is an example: Since only man [human] is rational. And no woman is a man [male]. Therefore, no woman is rational. [1] The first instance of "man" implies the entire human species, while the second implies just those who are male.