amphiboly

English

Etymology

From Old French amphibolie, from Latin amphibolia, from Ancient Greek ἀμφιβολία (amphibolía, “ambiguity”).

Pronunciation

• (UK) IPA^(key): /amˈfɪbəli/

Noun

amphiboly (countable and uncountable, plural amphibolies)

1. (grammar) An ambiguous grammatical construction.
   • 1781, Kant, "Critique of Pure Reason," from John Meiklejohn 1855 translation

     Without this reflection I should make a very unsafe use of these conceptions, and construct pretended synthetical propositions which critical reason cannot acknowledge and which are based solely upon a transcendental amphiboly, that is, upon a substitution of an object of pure understanding for a phenomenon.

   • 1931, Adrian Coates, “Philosophy as Criticism and Point of View,”, in Philosophy, volume 6, number 23, page 339:

     By logical errors I mean such simple things as Equivocation, Amphiboly, and Begging the Question.

   • 1987, Jeffrey Buechner, “Radically Misinterpreting Radical Interpretation,”, in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, volume 45, number 4, page 410:

     The language might be fraught with word ambiguity or sentence amphiboly.

Usage notes

• Strictly speaking, in an amphiboly the individual words are unambiguous; the ambiguity results entirely from the linguistic manner in which they have been combined.

Derived terms

• amphibolic
• amphibology

 

Translations

an ambiguous grammatical construction

• Hindi: संदिग्धता (hi) (sandigdhatā), अनेकार्थकता (anekārthaktā)
• Polish: amfibolia f, amfibologia f
• Tagalog: kabilaninsabi

See also

• equivocation

Anagrams

• ambophily