amphiboly
English edit
Etymology edit
From Old French amphibolie, from Latin amphibolia, from Ancient Greek ἀμφιβολία (amphibolía, “ambiguity”).
Pronunciation edit
Noun edit
amphiboly (countable and uncountable, plural amphibolies)
- (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.
- 1781, Kant, "Critique of Pure Reason," from John Meiklejohn 1855 translation
Usage notes edit
- Strictly speaking, in an amphiboly the individual words are unambiguous; the ambiguity results entirely from the linguistic manner in which they have been combined. [1]
Derived terms edit
Translations edit
an ambiguous grammatical construction
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See also edit
References edit
- ^ Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., 1989.