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ambiguity

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ambiguity

Not who you're looking for? Others named ambiguity: British-bred Thoroughbred racehorse · 2000 album by Brainstorm

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What's driving coverage of ambiguity right now?

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ambiguity across IJR

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Overview

Ambiguity is the type of meaning in which a phrase, statement, or resolution is not explicitly defined, making several interpretations plausible. A common aspect of ambiguity is uncertainty. It is thus an attribute of any idea or statement whose intended meaning cannot be definitively resolved, according to a rule or process with a finite number of steps. (The prefix ambi- reflects the idea of "two," as in "two meanings.") The concept of ambiguity is generally contrasted with vagueness. In ambiguity, specific and distinct interpretations are permitted (although some may not be immediately obvious), whereas with vague information it is difficult to form any interpretation at the desired level of specificity. Linguistic forms Lexical ambiguity is contrasted with semantic ambiguity. The former represents a choice between a finite number of known and meaningful context-dependent interpretations. The latter represents a choice between any number of possible interpretations, none of which may have a standard agreed-upon meaning. This form of ambiguity is closely related to vagueness. Ambiguity in human language is argued to reflect principles of efficient communication. Languages that communicate efficiently will avoid sending information that is redundant with information provided in the context. This can be shown mathematically to result in a system which is ambiguous when context is neglected. In this way, ambiguity is viewed as a generally useful feature of a linguistic system.

From Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Notable quotes

“If I take refuge in ambiguity, I assure you that it’s quite conscious.”
— Kingman Brewster Jr., on appointment as President of Yale University, as quoted in The New York Tribune (14 October 1963).
“If physics is too difficult for the physicists, the nonphysicist may wonder whether he should try at all to grasp its complexities and ambiguities. It is undeniably an effort, but probably one worth making, for the basic questions are important and the new experimental results are often fascinating.”
— Edward Condon, Physics, in What is Science? : Twelve Eminent Scientists and Philosophers Explain Their Various Fields to the Layman (1955), by James Roy Newman, p. 102.
“Life is inherently ambiguous; baseball games pit pure good against abject evil. Even Saddam Hussein must have committed one act of kindness in his life, but what iota of good could possibly be said for aluminum bats or the designated hitter rule?”
— Stephen Jay Gould, in "Baseball and the Two Faces of Janus", p. 272; originally published as "The Virtues of Nakedness" in The New York Review of Books (11 October 1990).
“Freedom succumbs to dizziness. Further than this, psychology cannot and will not go. In that very moment everything is changed, and freedom, when it again rises, sees that it is guilty. Between these two moments lies the leap, which no science has explained and which no science can explain. He who becomes guilty in anxiety becomes as ambiguously guilty as it is possible to become.”
— Søren Kierkegaard, in The Concept of Anxiety (1844), p. 61.
“In highly charged political matters, one person's ambiguity may be another person's truth.”
— Richard Mottram, in February 1985, as a prosecution witness in the case against Clive Ponting, as quoted in 'Sir Richard Mottram" by Richard Norton-Taylor, in The Guardian (25 February 2002).
“There are ambiguities in the art of painting but they are the ambiguities of a fine precision: the discovered fact of the image containing at the same time the reverberations of the unknown, the truly mysterious… I would take this further and add that painting is itself precise in its ideas. In the sense that the image is the idea in its purist form.”
— Patrick Swift, in "The Painter in the Press", X magazine, Vol. I, No.4 (October 1960).

Quotes via Wikiquote (CC BY-SA), each with its original source.

Ambiguity is the type of meaning in which a phrase, statement, or resolution is not explicitly defined, making several interpretations plausible. A common aspect of ambiguity is uncertainty. It is thus an attribute of any idea or statement whose intended meaning cannot be definitively resolved, according to a rule or process with a finite number of steps. (The prefix ambi- reflects the idea of "two," as in "two meanings.")

Overview

Ambiguity is the type of meaning in which a phrase, statement, or resolution is not explicitly defined, making several interpretations plausible. A common aspect of ambiguity is uncertainty. It is thus an attribute of any idea or statement whose intended meaning cannot be definitively resolved, according to a rule or process with a finite number of steps. (The prefix ambi- reflects the idea of "two," as in "two meanings.") The concept of ambiguity is generally contrasted with vagueness. In ambiguity, specific and distinct interpretations are permitted (although some may not be immediately obvious), whereas with vague information it is difficult to form any interpretation at the desired level of specificity. Linguistic forms Lexical ambiguity is contrasted with semantic ambiguity. The former represents a choice between a finite number of known and meaningful context-dependent interpretations. The latter represents a choice between any number of possible interpretations, none of which may have a standard agreed-upon meaning. This form of ambiguity is closely related to vagueness. Ambiguity in human language is argued to reflect principles of efficient communication. Languages that communicate efficiently will avoid sending information that is redundant with information provided in the context. This can be shown mathematically to result in a system which is ambiguous when context is neglected. In this way, ambiguity is viewed as a generally useful feature of a linguistic system.

From Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Not who you're looking for? Others named ambiguity: British-bred Thoroughbred racehorse · 2000 album by Brainstorm

Notable quotes

“If I take refuge in ambiguity, I assure you that it’s quite conscious.”
— Kingman Brewster Jr., on appointment as President of Yale University, as quoted in The New York Tribune (14 October 1963).
“If physics is too difficult for the physicists, the nonphysicist may wonder whether he should try at all to grasp its complexities and ambiguities. It is undeniably an effort, but probably one worth making, for the basic questions are important and the new experimental results are often fascinating.”
— Edward Condon, Physics, in What is Science? : Twelve Eminent Scientists and Philosophers Explain Their Various Fields to the Layman (1955), by James Roy Newman, p. 102.
“Life is inherently ambiguous; baseball games pit pure good against abject evil. Even Saddam Hussein must have committed one act of kindness in his life, but what iota of good could possibly be said for aluminum bats or the designated hitter rule?”
— Stephen Jay Gould, in "Baseball and the Two Faces of Janus", p. 272; originally published as "The Virtues of Nakedness" in The New York Review of Books (11 October 1990).
“Freedom succumbs to dizziness. Further than this, psychology cannot and will not go. In that very moment everything is changed, and freedom, when it again rises, sees that it is guilty. Between these two moments lies the leap, which no science has explained and which no science can explain. He who becomes guilty in anxiety becomes as ambiguously guilty as it is possible to become.”
— Søren Kierkegaard, in The Concept of Anxiety (1844), p. 61.
“In highly charged political matters, one person's ambiguity may be another person's truth.”
— Richard Mottram, in February 1985, as a prosecution witness in the case against Clive Ponting, as quoted in 'Sir Richard Mottram" by Richard Norton-Taylor, in The Guardian (25 February 2002).
“There are ambiguities in the art of painting but they are the ambiguities of a fine precision: the discovered fact of the image containing at the same time the reverberations of the unknown, the truly mysterious… I would take this further and add that painting is itself precise in its ideas. In the sense that the image is the idea in its purist form.”
— Patrick Swift, in "The Painter in the Press", X magazine, Vol. I, No.4 (October 1960).

Quotes via Wikiquote (CC BY-SA), each with its original source.

ambiguity across IJR

Ask Genius by OpenServe about ambiguity Create in Studio Build a game Watch videos