Ambiguity

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.

For instance, the word "bank" has several distinct lexical definitions, including "financial institution" and "edge of a river".

Lexical ambiguity can be addressed by algorithmic methods that automatically associate the appropriate meaning with a word in context, a task referred to as word-sense disambiguation.

The use of multi-defined words requires the author or speaker to clarify their context, and sometimes elaborate on their specific intended meaning (in which case, a less ambiguous term should have been used).

An exception to this could include a politician whose "weasel words" and obfuscation are necessary to gain support from multiple constituents with mutually exclusive conflicting desires from his or her candidate of choice.

The various ways to apply prefixes and suffixes can also create ambiguity ("unlockable" can mean "capable of being opened" or "impossible to lock").

However, the opposite can also be true—an opponent can turn a positive statement into a bad one if the speaker uses ambiguity (intentionally or not).

In continental philosophy (particularly phenomenology and existentialism), there is much greater tolerance of ambiguity, as it is generally seen as an integral part of the human condition.

Ethics cannot be based on the authoritative certainty given by mathematics and logic, or prescribed directly from the empirical findings of science.

Following Ernest Becker, he argues that the desire to 'authoritatively disambiguate' the world and existence has led to numerous ideologies and historical events such as genocide.

On this basis, he argues that ethics must focus on 'dialectically integrating opposites' and balancing tension, rather than seeking a priori validation or certainty.

Groucho Marx's classic joke depends on a grammatical ambiguity for its humor, for example: "Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas.

Mathematical notation is a helpful tool that eliminates a lot of misunderstandings associated with natural language in physics and other sciences.

Nonetheless, there are still some inherent ambiguities due to lexical, syntactic, and semantic reasons that persist in mathematical notation.

Usually, the conversion to another notation requires to scale the argument or the resulting value; sometimes, the same name of the function is used, causing confusions.

In each case of use of such notations, the reader is supposed to be able to perform the deduction and reveal the true meaning.

Fortran, in addition, does not allow use of the same name (identifier) for different objects, for example, function and variable; in particular, the expression

In the scientific journal style, one uses roman letters to denote elementary functions, whereas variables are written using italics.

, the reader can only infer from the context whether it means a single-index object, taken with the subscript equal to product of variables

Often the author's intention can be understood from the context, in cases where only one of the two makes sense, but an ambiguity like this should be avoided, for example by writing

The Berry paradox arises as a result of systematic ambiguity in the meaning of terms such as "definable" or "nameable".

Other terms with this type of ambiguity are: satisfiable, true, false, function, property, class, relation, cardinal, and ordinal.

[10] The analysis of a protein three-dimensional structure consists in dividing the macromolecule into subunits called domains.

Many Christians and Jews endorse Rudolf Otto's description of the sacred as 'mysterium tremendum et fascinans', the awe-inspiring mystery that fascinates humans.

[dubious – discuss] The apocryphal Book of Judith is noted for the "ingenious ambiguity"[11] expressed by its heroine; for example, she says to the villain of the story, Holofernes, "my lord will not fail to achieve his purposes", without specifying whether my lord refers to the villain or to God.

[12][13] The orthodox Catholic writer G. K. Chesterton regularly employed paradox to tease out the meanings in common concepts that he found ambiguous or to reveal meaning often overlooked or forgotten in common phrases: the title of one of his most famous books, Orthodoxy (1908), itself employed such a paradox.

To quote Sir Donald Francis Tovey (1935, p. 195), "Theorists are apt to vex themselves with vain efforts to remove uncertainty just where it has a high aesthetic value."

High levels of ambiguity in an emergency (e.g. an unconscious man lying on a park bench) make witnesses less likely to offer any sort of assistance, due to the fear that they may have misinterpreted the situation and acted unnecessarily.

Alternately, non-ambiguous emergencies (e.g. an injured person verbally asking for help) elicit more consistent intervention and assistance.

This usage is particularly prevalent with electronic memory devices (e.g. DRAM) addressed directly by a binary machine register where a decimal interpretation makes no practical sense.

Drawing of the back an anthropomorphic caterpillar, seated on a toadstool amid grass and flowers, blowing smoke from a hookah; a blonde girl in an old-fashioned frock is standing on tiptoe to peer at the caterpillar over the toadstool's edge
Sir John Tenniel 's illustration of the Caterpillar for Lewis Carroll 's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is noted for its ambiguous central figure, whose head can be viewed as either a man's face with a pointed nose and chin smoking a pipe, or as the end of an actual caterpillar , with the first two right "true" legs visible (1865). [ 1 ]
Structural analysis of an ambiguous Spanish sentence:
Pepe vio a Pablo enfurecido.
Interpretation 1: When Pepe was angry, then he saw Pablo.
Interpretation 2: Pepe saw that Pablo was angry.
Here, the syntactic tree in figure represents interpretation 2.
Which is wet: the food, or the cat?
The Necker cube and impossible cube , an underdetermined and overdetermined object, respectively.
This image can be interpreted three ways: as the letters "K B", as the mathematical inequality "1 < 13", or as the letters " V D" with their mirror image. [ 10 ]