The Fallacy of Vagueness or/and Ambiguity

Originally posted by DoctorScribbles
I'd want to know what your definition of "is" is.

Oh, and advanced student! You have identified the hidden equivocation in the argument. The first 'is' is the 'is' of identity. The second 'is' is the 'is' of predication, as is the third 'is'. Well done!

Originally posted by bbarr
I want you to identify those terms that you think are in need of clarification. I am an advocate of experiential learning, so if you are really interested in learning about these fallacies, I'm going to walk you through some arguments that suffer these flaws and ask you questions about them. I've found that it is easier to learn about logic and inference w ...[text shortened]... logic and draw some inferences. Besides, it will be instructive for those folk following along.

All right.

What or who is God ?

What or who is Love?

What or who is good ?

Originally posted by bbarr
No, this is incorrect. Those folk who are running these fallacies together are obscuring the very important distinction mentioned above. Here is how you can tell the difference between the two fallacies: Vague terms are those that do not h ...[text shortened]... relying on such a term will be guilty of two errors, not just one.

Bbarr: "No, this is incorrect. Those folk who are running these fallacies together are obscuring the very important distinction mentioned above."

If you are trying to teach me something please teach yourself how to read.

I said they were often MENTIONED together and they were sometimes closely related. This does not however nesessarily imply obscuring the DISTINCTION between the two.

BBarr: "Ambiguous terms are those with two different meanings."

Of course Ambigious terms are those terms with two or more different meanings.

There are people who would immediately and eagerly accuse you of being a liar for stating such a mistake. Please be carefull, Bbarr.

Am I improving ?

Originally posted by ivanhoe

All right.

What or who is God ?

What or who is Love?

What or who is good ?

Correct! How can we determine whether the relation of identity holds between the relata in the first premise unless we know what 'God' and 'love' refer to? Similarly with the determination of whether it is correct to predicate (or identify) love with good. This argument in unnacceptably vague because without clarification we cannot even begin to determine the truth values of the premises. So, a good rule of thumb when dealing with an argument is this: Does the argument contain any terms for which you have no idea what the referent of the term is? If so, although you may have some vague sense of what the term means, you should ask your interlocutor "To what does the term X refer"? This is also a good way to determine whether a term is being used in a technical sense, like the way I employ the term 'logical possibility', which refers to the property of not entailing a contradiction.

Originally posted by ivanhoe
Bbarr: "No, this is incorrect. Those folk who are running these fallacies together are obscuring the very important distinction mentioned above."

If you are trying to teach me something please teach yourself how to read.

I said they were often MENTIONED together and they were sometimes closely related. This does not however nesessarily imply obscurin ...[text shortened]... ou of being a liar for stating such a mistake. Please be carefull, Bbarr.

Am I improving ?

But they are not related, Ivanhoe, except in that they are both fallacies that have something to do with meaning and/or reference. That is what I've been trying to make clear. These are two quite different sorts of faults that a claim or an argument can have. Hopefully the arguments we are going through will make crystal clear to you this distinction.

Originally posted by bbarr
Correct! How can we determine whether the relation of identity holds between the relata in the first premise unless we know what 'God' and 'love' refer to? Similarly with the determination of whether it is correct to predicate (or identify) love with good. This argument in unnacceptably vague because without clarification we cannot even begin to determi ...[text shortened]... e term 'logical possibility', which refers to the property of not entailing a contradiction.

Bbarr: "Does the argument contain any terms for which you have no idea what the referent of the term is? If so, although you may have some vague sense of what the term means, you should ask your interlocutor "To what does the term X refer"?

To what or to whom refers the term "God" ?

To what or to whom refers the term "love" ?

To what or to whom refers the term "Love" ?

To what or to whom refers the term "good" ?

Originally posted by bbarr
But they are not related, Ivanhoe, except in that they are both fallacies that have something to do with meaning and/or reference. That is what I've been trying to make clear. These are two quite different sorts of faults that a claim or an argument can have. Hopefully the arguments we are going through will make crystal clear to you this distinction.

Bbarr: "But they are not related, Ivanhoe"

Maybe I should have said "they become twisted together" ?

Sorry for being vague, using terms with more than one meaning.

Originally posted by ivanhoe
Bbarr: "Does the argument contain any terms for which you have no idea what the referent of the term is? If so, although you may have some vague sense of what the term means, you should ask your interlocutor "To what does the term X refer ...[text shortened]... term "Love" ?

To what or to whom refers the term "good" ?

Very good, but that piece of advice was to be used when people present real life argument where they are trying to establish conclusions from premises. The argument...

God is love
Love is good
Hence God is good

...was merely an example so that we could get some practice in identifying vague terms and asking the proper questions.

But let us suppose, hypothetically, that some silly hippy did present this argument. Suppose he answered your questions like this:

God is the entity that created the universe and looks over us and he is all powerful and all knowing and all good.

Love is that emotion where you take other people's interests seriously for their own sake, and you want to be with them and they make you a little queasy when you see them unexpectedly or anticipate seeing them.

Good means valuable for its own sake, desirable, and worth some sacrifice.

Now, I have heard things like this before (back when I followed the band Phish for a Summer), so this isn't purely tongue-in-cheek. There are obvious problems with these "clarifications" of the the vague terms, specifically relating to how these terms now interrelate within the argument itself.

What do you take to be the most obvious problem here?

Originally posted by ivanhoe

Bbarr: "But they are not related, Ivanhoe"

Maybe I should have said "they become twisted together" ?

Sorry for being vague, using terms with more than one meaning.

lol, O.K., that is fine.

Originally posted by bbarr

What do you take to be the most obvious problem here?

The definite articles and demonstrative adjectives, which presume the existence of the described entities and emotions.

Originally posted by DoctorScribbles
The definite articles and demonstrative adjectives, which presume the existence of the described entities and emotions.

That is an old problem. Russell and Strawson went around and around on this. Could we take the Russellian line and construe the first premise, for instance, as an expression of a conjunction where two conjuncts consist of existentially quantified statements?

Originally posted by bbarr
That is an old problem. Russell and Strawson went around and around on this. Could we take the Russellian line and construe the first premise, for instance, as expression a conjunction where two conjuncts consist of existentially quantified statements?

I take your suggestion to mean that we should construct the proposition:

"If there exists an entity and a universe such that the entity created the universe and the entity is all-powerful, then the entity is God."


We could take that route, but we'd have to butt heads over definitions and axioms again.

Once you construe the expression that way, the statement may no longer be used as a definition, as it asserts something to be the case. It may only be used as an axiom taken as true, or as a proposition whose truth value is to be solved. That may be fine for the purpose of the toy syllogism, but it doesn't help to answer the question, "What does the term God mean?" (That is, once you deduce that an entity is God for having created a Universe and being all-powerful, you still haven't attached any meaning to being God. Said another way, what have you learned about the entity by making the deduction that the entity is God? Nothing.) For that, one needs a definition, such as "Let any all-powerful entity that created the Universe, and nothing else, be referred to as God." Then when once you have deduced something as being God, you know that all it means is that that entity created the universe and is all powerful, contrasted with above in which you don't really know what it means to be God.

Dr. S

Originally posted by DoctorScribbles
I take your suggestion to mean that we should construct the proposition:

"If there exists an entity and a universe such that the entity created the universe and the entity is all-powerful, then the entity is God."


We could take that route, but we'd have to butt heads over definitions and axioms again.

Once you construe the expression th ...[text shortened]... owerful, contrasted with above in which you don't really know what it means to be God.

Dr. S

No, by premise 1 I meant something like: "There is an X such that x is God and x is Love and for all y, if y is God then y is identical to x and for all z if z is Love than z is identical to x."

Originally posted by bbarr
No, by premise 1 I meant something like: "There is an X such that x is God and ..."

Oh, that's fine. There it's obvious that you're not attempting a definition. But you're taking God's existence as axiomatic, opening up the argument to be attacked by the position that some take that any argument based on false premises in invalid regardless of its formal validity.

Originally posted by bbarr
That's better. I thought you were dozing.

Here is an argument I take to problematically vague, where that means that some key terms need to clarified before the argument can be assessed:

God is love
Love is good
Hence, God is good

Now, if somebody presented this argument to you, what terms would you want clarified?

As presented it's a simple logical inference that is formally valid (and that is all that can be said about any valid inference). Potentially, love may be ambiguous as used in this syllogism, but without further context, there's no way to be sure.

I don't see any reason to be concerned with the truth values at this point either. As far as existential import - well that whole issue might be good for another thread.

I suppose that looking at different definitions could be useful. Is there a unambiguous definition of any of the terms that would make the inference formally invalid? At this point I'd say no.