In this short note we show that the so-called Ambiguous Set (2019) is a subclass of the Double Refined Indeterminacy Neutrosophic Set (2017) and is a particular case of the Refined Neutrosophic Set (2013). Also, the Ambiguous Set is similar to the Quadripartitioned Neutrosophic Set (2016), and Belnap’s Four-Valued Logic (1975).

Imprecise Bayesianism has been proposed as an alternative to Standard Bayesianism, partly because of its tools for representing ambiguity. Instead of representing credences via precise probabilities, a set of probability distributions is used to model belief states. However, there are criticisms of Imprecise Bayesianism’s update rule. A recent alternative update rule is Alpha Cut, which evades some of the primary criticisms of Imprecise Bayesian updating. We compare Alpha Cut with Imprecise Bayesianism and another alternative update approach called Calibration. We find (...) that Alpha Cut has problems with respect to ambiguity, coherence, and performance qualities, whereas there are more promising alternatives. (shrink)

We conducted a set of experiments to compare the effect of ambiguity in single-person decisions and games. Our results suggest that ambiguity has a bigger impact in games than in ball and urn problems. We find that ambiguity has the opposite effect in games of strategic substitutes and complements. This confirms a theoretical prediction made by Eichberger and Kelsey. In addition, we note that subjects’ ambiguity attitudes appear to be context dependent: ambiguity loving in single-person decisions and ambiguity averse in (...) games. This is consistent with the findings of Kelsey and le Roux. (shrink)

Ambiguity associated with everyday practice of science has made it difficult to reach a consensus on how to define misconduct in science. This essay outlines some of the important ambiguities of practice such as distinguishing data from noise, deciding whether results falsify a hypothesis, and converting research into research publications. The problem of ambiguity is further compounded by the prior intellectual commitments inherent in choosing problems and in dealing with the skepticism of one's colleagues. In preparing a draft code of (...) ethics for the American Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB), an attempt was made to take into account the ambiguities of practice. Also, the draft code adopted trust as its leading principle, specifically the importance of trust as a condition necessary for there to be science. During revision of the code, the focus on trust was changed. The new orientation was on trust as a consequence of carrying out science responsibly. By addressing the obligations necessary to engender trust, the ASBMB ethics code not only sets professional standards, but also makes a clear statement of public accountability. (shrink)

Ambiguity is a property of syntactic expressions which is ubiquitous in all informal languages–natural, scientific and mathematical; the efficient use of language depends to an exceptional extent on this feature. Disambiguation is the process of separating out the possible meanings of ambiguous expressions. Ambiguity is typical if the process of disambiguation can be carried out in some systematic way. Russell made use of typical ambiguity in the theory of types in order to combine the assurance of its (apparent) consistency (...) (“having the cake”) with the freedom of the informal untyped theory of classes and relations (“eating it too”). The paper begins with a brief tour of Russell’s uses of typical ambiguity, including his treatment of the statement Cls ∈ Cls. This is generalized to a treatment in simple type theory of statements of the form A ∈ B where A and B are class expressions for which A is prima facie of the same or higher type than B. In order to treat mathematically more interesting statements of self membership we then formulate a version of typical ambiguity for such statements in an extension of Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory. Specific attention is given to how the“naive” theory of categories can thereby be accounted for. (shrink)

Clinical trials of novel agents often present several layers of ethical challenge. Because time and resources for ethical and safety review are limited, how investigators, IRBs, and regulators allocate attention to a trial's various safety dimensions itself represents a critical ethical question. In what follows, I use the example of a Parkinson's disease gene transfer trial to show how risks involving unknown probabilities or outcomes (ambiguity), might sometimes draw attention away from risks that involve known probabilities or outcomes. This potentially (...) undermines the goal of ‘systematic and nonarbitrary analysis of risk’ during ethical review. To counteract the possible effects of such attention biases, I propose that reviewers develop ‘cognitive aids’ like lists and, where appropriate, set aside time to discuss non-ambiguous risks. I also propose further research for addressing and understanding how attention allocation, emotion, and ambiguity influence ethical decision-making. (shrink)

A sentence of the usual language of set theory is said to be stratified if it is obtained by “erasing” type indices in a sentence of the language of Russell's Simple Theory of Types. In this paper we give an alternative presentation of a proof the ambiguity theorem stating that any provable stratified sentence has a stratified proof. To this end, we introduce a new set of ambiguity axioms, inspired by Fraïssé's characterization of elementary equivalence; these axioms can be naturally (...) used to give different proofs of the ambiguity theorem . MSC: 03B15, 03F50, 03F55. (shrink)

Recent experimental studies have claimed to find evidence for the view that natural kind terms such as “water” are ambiguous: that they have two extensions, one determined by superficial properties, the other by underlying essence. In an online experiment, we presented to 600 participants scenarios describing discoveries of novel samples that differ in deep structure from samples of a familiar kind but are superficially identical, such as a water-like substance that is not composed of H2O. We used three different (...) types of question sets to probe whether the participants considered the sample as a member of the kind or not. Our results did not confirm the predictions of the ambiguity view. They were, rather, consistent with views that take underlying essences to be the sole criterion for membership in a natural kind. (shrink)

In the opening sections of this paper, we defined ambiguity in terms of distinct sentences (for a single sentence-string) with, in particular, distinct sets of truth conditions for the corresponding negative sentence-string. Lexical vagueness was defined as equivalent to disjunction, for under conditions of the negation of a sentence-string containing such an expression, all the relevant more specific interpretations of the string had also to be negated. Yet in the case of mixed quantification sentences, the strengthened, more specific, interpretations of (...) some such positive string are not all of them necessarily implied to be false if the corresponding negative sentence-string is asserted. On the contrary, as we saw in section 6, a negative sentence-string can be used to deny one of the more specific interpretations of the corresponding positive string without also denying other weaker interpretations of that same string. One might therefore argue that the only empirical evidence availble for assessing quantified sentences suggests clearly that these sentence-strings are ambiguous. Indeed logicians, many of whom restrict their attention to propositions, MUST recognise logical ambiguity at this point. For the contextualisation of the negative sentences in section 6 showed that it was possible to assert the falsity of some proposition P expressed by the sentence S while asserting a further proposition which was compatible with the truth of S. However the corresponding conclusion that such sentence-strings are sententially ambiguous is not a necessary conclusion for the linguist: for the alternative account of postulating a single semantic representation plus a set of semantic procedures is also compatible with the negation evidence. Moreover we have seen independent reasons for thinking that if sentential ambiguity is assumed to be in one-to-one correspondence with what we should now call logical ambiguity, a considerable body of generalisations is lost. For the maximal ambiguity account, it should be recalled, is committed to assigning at least thirteen distinct propositions and hence thirteen distinct sentence outputs for every sentence-string containing no more than two quantifiers, for three out of the four interpretations originally outlined in this paper can be understood with each numeral taken either in an ’exactly’ sense or in an ’at least’ sense. Moreover there is no explanation of why just these interpretations are available-they are merely an arbitrary list, no more connected than are the two interpretations of John saw her duck, with no reason to predict that the ambiguity would carry over from language to language. If then it is granted that an ambiguity account fails to capture appropriate generalisations, only two alternative accounts of mixed quantification sentence-strings remain viable-an analysis proposing an initial co-ordinate logical form like the logical form III, which is the strongest form compatible with each of the propositional interpretations of sentence-string Two examiners marked six scripts, and the radically weak form in which only existential quantification (both over sets and over members of those sets) is invoked. Since there are strong arguments to suggest that the procedures which both analyses require are semantic, there seems no reason not to adopt the radical vagueness account, with its considerably greater simplicity. (shrink)

Maximum-likelihood updating is a well-known approach for extending static ambiguity sensitive preferences to dynamic set-ups. This paper develops an example in which MLU induces an ambiguity averse maxmin expected utility decision-maker to prefer a bet on an ambiguous over a risky urn and be more willing to bet on the ambiguous urn compared to an subjective expected utility decision-maker. This is challenging, since prior to observing draws from the urns, the MEU decision-maker actually preferred the risky over the (...) ambiguous bet and was less willing to bet on the ambiguous urn than the SEU decision-maker. The identified switch in betting preferences is not due to a violation of dynamic consistency or consequentialism. Rather, it results from MLU’s selection of extreme priors, causing a violation of the stability of set inclusion over the course of the updating process. (shrink)

While distinguishing between the actions and physical boundaries of self and other (non-self) is usually straightforward there are contexts in which such differentiation is challenging. For example, self-other ambiguity may occur when actions of others are similar or complementary to those of the self. Even in the absence of such situational challenges, individuals experiencing hallucinations have difficulties with this distinction, often experiencing thoughts or actions of self as belonging to other agents. This paper explores the role of ambiguity in self-other (...) differentiation, drawing from developmental, psychodynamic and neurocognitive perspectives. A key proposal is that engagement in contexts that make distinctions between self and other challenging yet necessary allow reality-testing skills related to agency to develop. Attunement in typical caregiver-infant interactions is framed as a safe but inherently ambiguous environment that provides optimal condition for the infant to develop a coherent self-other sense. Vulnerability to psychosis may be related to limited access to such an environment in early development. However, the perceptual, cognitive and social skills that contribution to attribution are likely to be malleable following infancy and improve though opportunities for boundary play in similarly ambiguous settings. Using music-making to illustrate, we postulate that engagement in intricate joint-actions that blurs agentic boundaries can contribute to the continued development of an adaptive sense of self and other essential to healthy social functioning. Increased insight into the self-other ambiguity may enhance our understanding of mechanisms underlying ‘self-disorders’ such as schizophrenia and eventually extend the range of social and arts-based therapeutic possibilities. (shrink)

How should we make decisions when we do not know the relevant physical probabilities? In these ambiguous situations, we cannot use our knowledge to determine expected utilities or payoffs. The traditional Bayesian answer is that we should create a probability distribution using some mix of subjective intuition and objective constraints. Imprecise Bayesians argue that this approach is inadequate for modelling ambiguity. Instead, they represent doxastic states using credal sets. Generally, insofar as we are more uncertain about the physical probability (...) of an event, there is more divergence in the credal set. Hence, their approach can represent these ambiguities via the extent of the divergence. Imprecise Bayesianism has mostly been advocated for its epistemological features. In this article, we examine its properties for decision-making. We develop a model for comparing standard and Imprecise Bayesianism by testing their performances in a classic decision problem. We find that the representational tools of Imprecise Bayesianism also cause it to underperform in our tests. This issue has been overlooked, because previous research on Imprecise Bayesianism has not utilised agent-based modelling to provide information about its performance in the short-run. Overall, we reveal the Ambiguity Dilemma for Imprecise Bayesianism: To what extent should one value representational power or decision-making performance? (shrink)

Background: For a long time, altruism was the basis for caring. Today, when society is more individualized, it is of interest to explore the meaning of altruism in nursing. Methods: In all, 13 nurses from a Swedish acute care setting participated in two focus group interviews performed as Socratic dialogues. Data were analyzed using a phenomenological hermeneutical method. Ethical considerations: Ethical issues were considered throughout the process according to established ethical principles. Informed consent was obtained from all participants, confidentiality regarding (...) the data was guaranteed and quotations anonymized. Findings: Altruism created a sense of ambivalence and ambiguity, described as a rise of sovereign expressions of life caused by “the other’s” need, but also unwillingness to take unconditional responsibility for “the other.” Conclusion: Society’s expectations of altruism and nurses’ perception of their work as a salaried job collide in modern healthcare. Nurses are not willing to fully respond to the ethical demand of the patients. In case of a disaster, when nurses personal safety, life and health may be at risk, there might be reasons to question whether the healthcare organization would be able to fulfill its obligations of providing healthcare to an entire population. (shrink)

Ambiguity, in the decision-theoretic sense, means that agents are unable to identify unique probabilities for some events that they care about. Ambiguity characterizes many real-life situations, but many important questions surrounding it are still open. Descriptively, we know that people typically perceive and are sensitive to ambiguity in certain kinds of situations. Intuitively, this is well justified. Normatively, however, many think that ambiguous beliefs and ambiguity sensitivity are irrational. This raises questions such as: Why are people sensitive to ambiguity? (...) Does it lead to inferior decisions, in particular given people’s usual decision environments? An interesting clue is that there are many examples of social contexts in which ambiguity benefits everyone involved. Hence, we investigate the possibility that ambiguity sensitivity is ‘ecologically rational’ or adaptive in a multi-agent, strategic setting. We explore the viability of ambiguity sensitive behaviour using evolutionary simulations. Our results indicate that ambiguity sensitivity can be adaptive in strategic contexts, and is especially beneficial when agents have to coordinate. (shrink)

A critical property of the perception of spoken words is the transient ambiguity of the speech signal. In localist models of speech perception this ambiguity is captured by allowing the parallel activation of multiple lexical representations. This paper examines how a distributed model of speech perception can accommodate this property. Statistical analyses of vector spaces show that coactivation of multiple distributed representations is inherently noisy, and depends on parameters such as sparseness and dimensionality. Furthermore, the characteristics of coactivation vary considerably, (...) depending on the organization of distributed representations within the mental lexicon. This view of lexical access is supported by analyses of phonological and semantic word representations, which provide an explanation of a recent set of experiments on coactivation in speech perception (Gaskell & Marslen–Wilson, 1999). (shrink)

In this article I will examine Ricœur’s idea of the universal in his understanding of justice. Scholars recently discussed the extent to which Ricœur understands universal moral norms and universal rules of justice in his anthropology of human action, and argue that Ricœur stresses too much the idea of universal moral norms with regard to cultural and moral diversity,. G. H. Taylor, “Reenvisioning Justice,” Lo Squarda 12 : 65-80). In this article I will take part in the debate about universalism (...) and approach Ricœur’s idea of the universal from a different angle, in placing it in light of his idea of evil. The point I will aim to make in this article is that Ricœur’s idea of the relation between justice and evil demonstrates what I understand as the ambiguity of justice, which highlights the difficulty of defining universal rules of justice. I will argue that this ambiguity is the following: justice aims at the establishment of social peace and in that sense it is the necessary remedy against human evil, but justice also implies power, and possibly violence, over others in that it relates to violent feelings of vengeance, to institutional mechanism of authority, and to a struggle of values. Yet if rules of justice relate to evil in the sense of power over others, so I argue, then it is problematic to define absolute criteria for rules of justice, i.e., for rules for social peace: because justice relates to particular values, which means that the risk of violence is inherent to institutional rules of justice, there is no ultimate universal set of such rules. This article therefore questions Ricœur’s understanding of universal rules of justice in Oneself as Another. Yet, I will also draw on a series of other texts of Ricœur on justice, and argue that Ricœur’s idea of justice allows understanding how we find common sensibilities about justice through dialogue, a sensibility for the other, and narratives as a way of critique of existing moral norms and rules of justice. (shrink)

One of the central debates in the philosophy of language is that between defenders of the causal-historical and descriptivist theories of reference. Most philosophers involved in the debate support one or the other of the theories. Building on recent experimental work in semantics, we argue that there is a sense in which both theories are correct. In particular, we defend the view that natural kind terms can sometimes take on a causal-historical reading and at other times take on a descriptivist (...) reading. The meaning will shift depending on the conversational setting. The theoretical view has roots in work by Kitcher. We present some original experiments that support the thesis. (shrink)

We show how the endowment effect can be interpreted in terms of ambiguity aversion. Agents take status quo as their reference point, relative to which they evaluate potential trades. The value of exchanged goods is ambiguous, represented by a set of probability distributions over possible values. Agents are ambiguity averse, modeled as maxmin expected utility maximisers. This characteristic leads a seller to focus on the case of selling a high value good and leads a buyer to focus on the (...) case of buying a low value good. Consequently, the seller’s willingness to accept (WTA) is inflated and the buyer’s willingness to pay (WTP) is deflated, producing an endowment effect. Assuming that agents incorporate new information via Bayesian updating of the set of priors, we show that information decreases the WTP-WTA gap. In this way our model can account for the known facts that the endowment effect is mitigated by physical contact with the good, decreasing in experience, larger for non-market goods, and more dependent on possession of the good than on ownership. (shrink)

Brown (1999) applied preservationist ideas to generate consequence relations first exploited by relevance and dialetheic logicians. The central lesson of the paper was that a systematic application of ambiguity can produce consistent images of inconsistent premise sets, allowing us to systematically constrain the consequences that can be inferred from them. Here we present several different ways to apply ambiguity and the preservation of ambiguity measures to obtain paraconsistent logics. The first uses ambiguity to project consistent images of inconsistent premise sets. (...) The second shifts the focus from the syntactic to the semantic, allowing some atoms to receive ambiguous assignments, i.e. assignments that differ from instance to instance. Finally, the third extends the second with a simple game that captures the consequence relation of first degree entailment, dealing symmetrically with triviality on the right as well as the left. The chapter ends with the observation that preservation of a consequence relation under a range of images offers a new way of applying the general theme of preservationism to produce new (and sometimes better behaved) consequence relations. (shrink)

A citizen of Early Renaissance Florence that stepped out into the streets and entered the spaces of his civic world joined a concert of creative formal behaviors in which he was at once an actor and a spectator. His problem here was to interpret the complex web of overlapping, conflicting and simultaneous meanings he would have read in the actions and images by which the community directed him and represented itself, and find his own place and set his standing. On (...) most occasions he would probably have elected for a state of suspension, a floating of multiple possibilities he was loath to precipitate in too stable a form: in ambiguity the citizen of Florence developed a richness of signification, and found a refuge. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 65.1 (2004) 1-13 [Access article in PDF] Ambiguities of the Prisca Sapientia in Late Renaissance Humanism Martin Mulsow University of Munich The wisdom of the ancients, says Marsilio Ficino, was a pious philosophy.1 Born among the Egyptians with Hermes Trismegistus—and, according to Ficino's later writings, concurrently among the Persians with Zoroaster—it was raised by the Thracians under Orpheus and Aglaophemus. It later matured (...) under Pythagoras among the Greeks and Italians and culminated in Plato. As is well known, this genealogy was not merely a historical thesis for Ficino and his followers but also a program for revival, a utopia achieved through restoration. For the assertion of a concordance between these early philosophies and their accordance with Christianity—in the sense of a Christian Platonism—implied the synthesis of fragementary philosophemes into a fully developed doctrine in the service of a uniform and timely philosophia pia.This program was formulated in a variety of ways during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with differing protagonists and with diverse aims. Thus one could supplement the genealogy in a cabalist vein, introduce biblical characters such as Solomon or Moses, or (as was done by Bruno) use it to contest Christian doctrine. The genealogy could be read as culminating in various notable modern figures such as for example, Paracelsus. Aristotle could be included or excluded from it, depending on whether one wanted to assimilate the Aristotelian tradition or to distance oneself from it; and one could leave the end [End Page 1] of this genealogical lineage open in order to exhort the necessity of a scientific and moral reform.Here, however, we shall be occupied with the question of what became of this program during the late Renaissance, when two developments took place simultaneously: on the one hand, the utopia of the prisca sapientia set about to conquer the field formerly reserved to the Aristotelians, namely, natural philosophy; on the other hand, the first doubts arose about the overall validity of the historical-philological foundation of the program, especially the dating of the works of Hermes Trismegistus. The latter began with the publication of the first part of Patrizi's Discussiones peripateticae in 1571,which aimed to rehabilitate, contrary to Aristotle's critique, old presocratic natural philosophies, and in so doing it cleared the way for interpreting the latest advancements in non-Aristotelian natural sciences as resumptions of these very philosophies.2 This initiated a period of complex interaction between late humanist philology, innovative natural science, and speculative metaphysics.This phase, however, not only entailed the grand synthesizing endeavors that one finds in Patrizi's Nova de universis philosophia;it also introduced historical critique—no doubt provoked by Patrizi—of the Hermetic prisca sapientia, understood in Frances Yates's sense, which was performed in careful detail long before Casaubon at the end of the Renaissance.3 Further, it was a phase characterized by an attempt to reevaluate Aristotelian philosophy against its opponents, which paradoxically was also motivated by Patrizi yet which managed to keep the venture open to "esoteric" depths. All of these developments were intertwined, and each effected the articulation of encyclopedic projects at the beginning of the seventeenth century. On the basis of manuscripts, letters, and some neglected texts, I want to introduce two such countercurrents, which illustrate how the migration of arguments from one cultural context to another can lead to wholly divergent and unexpected results. Moreover, these results show the diverse consequences that a prisca sapientia-utopia could have for different visions of encyclopedic scholarship.I. In the bookshop of Paolo Meietti in Padua, Teodoro Angelucci and Antonio Persio met accidentally on an autumn day in 1558. Meietti was the publisher of Angelucci's medical textbook as well as of texts by Patrizi and his [End Page 2] colleague Giannini, and it is possible that Persio was out to discuss publishing possibilities for his forthcoming manuscript De natura ignis. In any case, they were there for business-related matters, so it was quite natural for Persio to... (shrink)

This article raises three challenges to Richard McCormick's proportionalism. First, adequately to judge proportionate reason requires the specification of a particular background moral content and metaphysical context. Absent such specification, evaluation of proportionate reason is inherently and deeply ambiguous. Second, to resolve such ambiguity and yet remain Christian, proportionalism must adopt a forthrightly Christian moral content set within a straightforwardly Christian metaphysics. This move will, however, set Christian bioethics off as sectarian—a conclusion McCormick wishes to avoid. Third, even if (...) proportionalism were to adopt a Christian moral content and metaphysics to avoid such ambiguity, its methodology sets aside a key aspect of the Christian life: repentance. Proportionalism does not account for the core reality that repentance plays in one's personal encounter with and knowledge of God. As I will argue, the challenge in part is that moral action cannot be adequately conceptualized, nor can moral theology be properly understood, outside of the authentic practice of the religious life, and repentance is central to that Christian reality. (shrink)

This paper considers decision problems involving partial information, and presents a conception of commodification of information under which a buyer with limited probabilistic sophistication can reduce any resulting ambiguity through purchases of new probabilistic information. In the specific formulation articulated herein, a lottery of information batches helps overcome the induced holdup during the contracting process. Under the proposed formulation, additional noise in the lottery leads to a reduction in the randomness of the buyer’s ambiguity by the introduction of an expectation (...) operator for random sets of beliefs. We show that the buyer’s utility function for information, formalized as Hurwicz expected utility, is monotone, continuous and linear in information. We then discuss the value of information within the corresponding decision problem and contrast it with the influential formulation of Radner–Stiglitz. (shrink)

Pascal’s famous pragmatic argument for belief in God is plagued by a number of well-known problems, not the least of which is related to the claim that significant benefits may arise when we acquire a certain set of religious beliefs. But it is reasonable to hold a wide range of conflicting beliefs about the existence of God, the nature and supposed purposes of divine reality, and other related metaphysical claims. If it is not clear what claims are true about God, (...) then the world is religiously ambiguous. If the world is characterized by religious ambiguity, then the punishment-reward structure that underlies Pascalian wagering should be rejected in favor of what I call the agnostic wager. Given our bewildering epistemic situation in relation to questions about divine reality, if theism is true it is unlikely that it matters whether we believe theism is true. (shrink)

In this book, a set of problems which overlap philosophy, linguistics, cognitive psychology, and artificial intelligence are examined from the point of view of Chomsky's linguistics. The author uses linguistic analysis to shed new light on the philosophical and logical problems of meaning, ambiguity, truth, falsity, negation and existence. He shows that visual and verbal symbols have ways of meaning in common.

A set often rules is proposed for dealing with problems of ambiguity when interpreting a text of argumentative discourse. The rules are based on Grice's pragmatic rules for a collaborative conversation and on principles and maxims used to deal with ambiguity in interpreting legal and religious writings. The rules are meant to be applied to a given argument used in a given case, and to resolve (or at least deal with) an ambiguity in the argument (or affecting the argument) by (...) using evidence derived from the text and context of dialogue surrounding the argument in the case. (shrink)

Lexical ambiguity—the phenomenon of a single word having multiple, distinguishable senses—is pervasive in language. Both the degree of ambiguity of a word (roughly, its number of senses) and the relatedness of those senses have been found to have widespread effects on language acquisition and processing. Recently, distributional approaches to semantics, in which a word's meaning is determined by its contexts, have led to successful research quantifying the degree of ambiguity, but these measures have not distinguished between the ambiguity of words (...) with multiple related senses versus multiple unrelated meanings. In this work, we present the first assessment of whether distributional meaning representations can capture the ambiguity structure of a word, including both the number and relatedness of senses. On a very large sample of English words, we find that some, but not all, distributional semantic representations that we test exhibit detectable differences between sets of monosemes (unambiguous words; N = 964), polysemes (with multiple related senses; N = 4,096), and homonyms (with multiple unrelated senses; N = 355). Our findings begin to answer open questions from earlier work regarding whether distributional semantic representations of words, which successfully capture various semantic relationships, also reflect fine‐grained aspects of meaning structure that influence human behavior. Our findings emphasize the importance of measuring whether proposed lexical representations capture such distinctions: In addition to standard benchmarks that test the similarity structure of distributional semantic models, we need to also consider whether they have cognitively plausible ambiguity structure. (shrink)

This paper reports on the responses of 646 individuals to environmental risk information involving different forms of risk ambiguity. Recipients of more than one set of risk information do not simply average the risk levels provided. Rather, a variety of aspects of the nature of the risks that are communicated influence their probabilistic beliefs. Individuals' perceptions of the risk levels to which they are exposed are likely to be greater: (i) for more ambiguous risks, (ii) for risks for which (...) the unfavorable risk evidence is presented last even when there is no temporal order, (iii) for risks for which the most unfavorable risk studies have been performed most recently, and (iv) for risks where there is asymmetry in the risk ambiguity that imposes substantial potential downside risks. Although these effects are modest for the median individual, the potential for extreme responses that reflect only the most adverse or the most favorable piece of information provided is quite prevalent. These findings are of interest more generally in that they indicate how individuals form their risk perceptions in the presence of risk ambiguity. (shrink)

The problem addressed is that of finding a sound characterization of ambiguity. Two kinds of characterizations are distinguished: tests and definitions. Various definitions of ambiguity are critically examined and contrasted with definitions of generality and indeterminacy, concepts with which ambiguity is sometimes confused. One definition of ambiguity is defended as being more theoretically adequate than others which have been suggested by both philosophers and linguists. It is also shown how this definition of ambiguity obviates a problem thought to be posed (...) by ambiguity for truth theoretical semantics. In addition, the best known test for ambiguity, namely the test by contradiction, is set out, its limitations discussed, and its connection with ambiguity's definition explained. The test is contrasted with a test for vagueness first proposed by Peirce and a test for generality propounded by Margalit. (shrink)

Several years ago, Cohen, Dearnaley, and Hansel [1] demonstrated that under the influence of alcohol drivers became more risk prone, although their risk perception remained unchanged. Research shows that ambiguity aversion is to some extent positively correlated with risk aversion, though not very highly [2]. The question addressed by the present research is whether alcohol reduces ambiguity aversion. Our research was conducted in a natural setting (a restaurant bar), where customers with differing levels of alcohol intoxication were offered a choice (...) between a risky and an ambiguous lottery. We found that alcohol reduced ambiguity aversion and that the effect occurred in men but not women. We interpret these findings in terms of the risk-as-value hypothesis, according to which, people in Western culture tend to value risk, and suggest that alcohol consumption triggers adherence to socially and culturally valued patterns of conduct different for men and women. (shrink)

If Σ is a set of symbols, a formula F is said to be non-ambiguous if all models of F coincide on the terms built on Σ (i.e. if any ground atom built on the signature Σ must have the same truth value in all the models of F). Non-ambiguous formulae can be used as representations of a Herbrand interpretation defined on the signature Σ. An important advantage of this technique is that any existing theorem prover may be (...) used to evaluate literals and clauses in the models thus represented (using the standard proof by consistency mechanism). In this work, a method is proposed to extract automatically from some satisfiable clause sets S a non ambiguous formula F such that the interpretation represented by F is a model of S. In contrast to previous works, clauses occurring in S may contain equational literals and can have more than one maximal literal. (shrink)

When preferences are such that there is no unique additive prior, the issue of which updating rule to use is of extreme importance. This paper presents an axiomatization of the rule which requires updating of all the priors by Bayes rule. The decision maker has conditional preferences over acts. It is assumed that preferences over acts conditional on event E happening, do not depend on lotteries received on Ec, obey axioms which lead to maxmin expected utility representation with multiple priors, (...) and have common induced preferences over lotteries. The paper shows that when all priors give positive probability to an event E, a certain coherence property between conditional and unconditional preferences is satisfied if and only if the set of subjective probability measures considered by the agent given E is obtained by updating all subjective prior probability measures using Bayes rule. (shrink)

Although many people have extensively studied the earlier parts of Galois’s testamentary letter, in particular those concerning the Galois theory of algebraic equations and related group theory, it seems that the theory of ambiguity near the end of his letter is less well known and studied, and therefore, remaining somewhat mysterious. One purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of diverse interpretations of Galois’s theory of ambiguity by people such as Lie, Klein, Picard, and Grothendieck. We will discuss (...) how well they fit Galois’s description for this theory and whether they satisfy one important criterion set by him. After a careful analysis of Galois’s statements regarding the theory of ambiguity and the rationale behind them, by taking all Galois’s works into consideration, we will offer our interpretation of it through the theory of monodromy for linear differential equations. Our findings challenge the common perception that Galois could not foresee applications of group theory beyond algebraic equations. Subsequently, we will discuss how these various interpretations have influenced later development of mathematics, particularly their impact on Lie’s idée fixe to develop a theory of transformation groups for differential equations. This analysis also raises doubts about a certain aspect of the commonly accepted narrative regarding the origin of the theory of Lie groups, and provides one important example of theories partially motivated by Galois’s theory of ambiguity. Additionally, we will identify results from works of his near contemporaries such as Riemann, Fuchs, Jordan and later generations such as Siegel, which seem to fit well our rendering of Galois’s description and criterion. This demonstrates the potentially intended broad scope of Galois’s theory of ambiguity. Furthermore, their alignment with our interpretation of Galois’s theory of ambiguity adds feasibility and credibility to the latter. We hope that the analysis in this paper will enhance our understanding of the meaning and impacts of Galois’s theory of ambiguity, reaffirming the profound and broad vision that Galois held for mathematics. Moreover, this paper contributes to an effort to reevaluate some of Galois’s seminal contributions and their impacts on the development of mathematics, transcending the traditional boundaries of algebra and number theory. (shrink)

The philosophy of historiography has been mostly preoccupied with addressing the question “how can the past be known?”, either by describing historiographical practice or by prescribing what it ought to be. This paper argues that there is a more fundamental question that needs to be answered before turning to examine the methodology of historical inquiry. This question concerns the nature of historians’ concern with the past. The past, I argue, is an ambiguous expression which has different meanings in different (...) explanatory contexts. The past that is relevant to the genetic palaeontologist, for example, is not the same as that which is of concern to the cultural historian, for they have different explanatory goals. These are reflected in the kind of questions they ask and the methodology they adopt to answer them. If there are different senses of the past, then there cannot be a single epistemology of historical inquiry. The project of disambiguation therefore casts a different light on the primary task of the philosophy of historiography. It entails that the primary task of the philosophy of historiography should be to engage in a conceptual inquiry aimed at establishing the sense of the past that is at play in different kinds of history before turning to answer any methodological questions as to how the past can be known. In pursuing the project of disambiguation, this paper draws inspiration from the kind of presuppositional analysis found in the work of late British idealists R. G. Collingwood and Michael Oakeshott and their defence of a distinctive, humanistic concern with the past. But this paper is an homage to their way of philosophising rather than a step-by-step reconstruction of their arguments. It claims that there is a distinctive sense of the past that corresponds to a humanistic conception of reality that is sui generis and irreducible, and that failing to acknowledge the different senses of the past only leads to conceptual confusion. Section 2 shows that the kind of evidence that is relevant to one explanatory context may be irrelevant to another and thus that it is possible to know a great deal about the past under one description and very little or nothing about it under another. Since the kind of evidence that is valuable in one explanatory context may not be so in another, there cannot be a single epistemology of historical knowledge since the methods suited to recover one kind of past may not yield any results if applied to a different sense of the past. The primary task of a philosophy of historiography should be to disambiguate the explanandum of different forms of history. Section 3 argues that the primary reason why the distinctive sense of the past that belongs to history as a humanistic pursuit is often overlooked is due to a blindness to the distinction between rules or norms and laws or regularities, and section 4 shows that the relation between different kinds of history corresponds to the relationship between different forms of knowledge, which are governed by different presuppositions. The project of disambiguation, as discussed in Section 5, shows that the sense of the past which belongs to history as a humanistic pursuit is not that of a mere segment of time, one that is infinitesimal small when compared to geological time, but that of reality understood under a different set of assumptions. An important upshot of rethinking the task of a philosophy of historiography along these lines is that it reconnects it to mainstream debates in philosophy. For a long time, the philosophy of historiography has operated in relative isolation from the philosophical mainstream. This paper shows that the issues which face philosophers of historiography bear important affinities to the challenges posed by the attempts to make sense of the relation between the manifest and the scientific image in contemporary analytic metaphysics and that the philosophy of historiography need not be seen as a philosophical backwater whose concerns have little relevance to what goes on elsewhere in mainstream philosophical discussion. (shrink)

Readers have much to consider when evaluating Greenblum and Hubbard’s conclusion that ‘physicians have no business doing theology’.1 The two central arguments the authors offer are fairly convincing within the confines they set for themselves, the provisos they stipulate and their notions of ‘privacy’ and ‘public reason’. However, I would ask readers to consider two questions, the answers to which I believe the authors leave opaque. First, what is theological negotiation? Second, what makes chaplains the singular group of healthcare professionals (...) responsible for theological negotiation? In this Commentary, I explore these questions not with the goal of rejecting the authors’ conclusion, but rather with the goal of highlighting relevant considerations when evaluating the authors’ central tenets. First, I would like readers to consider Greenblum and Hubbard’s descriptions of theological negotiation. They categorise theological negotiation into metaphysical, normative and alternative responses, and hold that this kind of negotiation is, for the most part, impermissible for healthcare professionals, save chaplains.1 The examples of Dr Chatterjee and Dr Thompson expand theological negotiation to include instances where physicians add a theological veneer to their clinical recommendations. In both the examples, the physician has made the case for accepting or rejecting a certain intervention—for Dr Chatterjee, accepting …. (shrink)

When faced with an ambiguous pronoun, comprehenders use both multimodal cues and linguistic cues to identify the antecedent. While research has shown that gestures facilitate language comprehension, improve reference tracking, and influence the interpretation of ambiguous pronouns, literature on reference resolution suggests that a wide set of linguistic constraints influences the successful resolution of ambiguous pronouns and that linguistic cues are more powerful than some multimodal cues. To address the outstanding question of the importance of gesture as (...) a cue in reference resolution relative to cues in the speech signal, we have previously investigated the comprehension of contrastive gestures that indexed abstract referents – in this case expressions of personal preference – and found that such gestures did facilitate the resolution of ambiguous statements of preference. In this study, we extend this work to investigate whether the effect of gesture on resolution is diminished when the gesture indexes a statement that is less likely to be interpreted as the correct referent. Participants watched videos in which a speaker contrasted two ideas that were either neutral or moral acceptable). A gesture to the left or right side co-occurred with speech expressing each position. In gesture-disambiguating trials, an ambiguous phrase was accompanied by a gesture to one side or the other. In gesture non-disambiguating trials, no third gesture occurred with the ambiguous phrase. Participants were more likely to choose the idea accompanied by gesture as the stimulus speaker’s preference. We found no effect of scenario type. Regardless of whether the linguistic cue expressed a view that was morally charged or neutral, observers used gesture to understand the speaker’s opinion. This finding contributes to our understanding of the strength and range of cues, both linguistic and multimodal, that listeners use to resolve ambiguous references. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The phrase “ambiguous utopia” was coined by Ursula K. Le Guin in the subtitle of her novel, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia. That work appeared when utopian narratives had been displaced by dystopian imaginaries. This article embarks on a comparative analysis of three short stories: Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”, Angélica Gorodischer’s “Of Navigators”, and N. K. Jemisin’s “The Ones Who Stay and Fight”. Each author installs ambiguity at the center of (...) their open-ended utopian imaginaries as a way to challenge dogma, pessimism, and complacency. Le Guin interrogates the boundary between belief and knowledge to hold the threat of authoritarianism at bay. Gorodischer, a friend and contemporary of Le Guin, is considered a central figure of Argentine science fiction and fantasy. Her story imagines the discovery of a second Earth set in 1492 and highlights the need for utopianism to challenge the legacy of colonization. Finally, Jemisin’s story is a critical homage to “Omelas.” Jemisin shares the decolonial impetus of Gorodischer’s fiction, and she constructs Um-Helat on an explicitly antiracist foundation. Instead of walking away, her characters actively fight the creeping threat of intolerance while working toward that better place. (shrink)

This chapter introduces Beauvoir's conception of motherhood in The Second Sex. Beauvoir sets out to demystify motherhood by presenting women's experiences of pregnancy and mothering in all their difficulty, complexity, and ambivalence. However, Beauvoir works with a contrast between transcendence and immanence which inclines her to interpret pregnancy and maternity in terms of immanence (i.e. unfreedom). This chapter identifies alternative lines of thought in Beauvoir's work which portray maternity more positively: as disclosing our fundamental ambiguity, the bodily roots of free (...) human agency, and the constitutive role of relationships with others in human existence. (shrink)

Apollonius Dyscolus’ use of ambiguity in grammatical problem-solving has in recent years had the benefit of two scholarly studies. David Blank, in the course of his analysis of the Syntax as a whole, has described the broad functions which Apollonius assigns to ambiguity. Jean Lallot's 1988 paper, ‘Apollonius Dyscole et l'ambigüité linguistique: problemes et solutions’, is devoted exclusively to the treatment of linguistic ambiguity in Apollonius’ work. Yet it is to be feared that the flood of light thrown by these (...) scholars on what had been an unregarded corner of ancient grammar has shown up rather more than Apollonius would have cared to admit, both about the nature, and about the prospects for success, of the enterprise on which he was engaged. At the same time, certain structural features of ancient grammar, at least of the ancient grammar which Apollonius himself constructed, have come into sharper focus: features clear enough with the benefit of hindsight, but glimpsed, it appears, all too dimly by Apollonius himslf. It is now worryingly clear not only that ambiguity was ambiguous for Apollonius, but also that the ambiguity of ambiguity represented a genuine threat to the coherence and value of his work. In this paper I set out to justify both these claims. (shrink)

With the advent of the semantic web, the problem of ambiguity is becoming more and more urging. Semantic analysis is necessary for explaining and resolving some sorts of ambiguity by inquiring into the relation between possibilities of predication and definition of a concept in order to solve problems such as interpretation and ambiguity. If computing is now approaching such problems of linguistic analysis, what is worth inquiring into is how the development of linguistic studies can be useful for developing the (...) theoretical background of ontologies. Our proposal is to develop a theory of definition alternative to the traditional metaphysical approach and the modern relativistic account. We interpret the ancient notion of essential definition in a dialectical perspective, and show how the dialectical definition by genus and difference corresponds to the semantic analysis of the definiendum. The dialectical definition is shown to be grounded on the deepest endoxa (shared knowledge) of a community, and to be the argumentatively strongest definition. After presenting the most common types of definition used in argumentation, the linguistic and logical characteristics of the notion of definition by genus and difference are set out in a pragmatic framework. (shrink)

In this article, ambiguity attitude is measured through the maximum price a decision maker is willing to pay to know the probability of an event. Two problems are examined in which the decision maker faces an act: in one case, buying information implies playing a lottery, while, in the other case, buying information gives also the option to avoid playing the lottery. In both decision settings, relying on the Choquet expected utility model, we study how the decision maker’s risk and (...) ambiguity attitudes affect the reservation price for ambiguity resolution. These effects are analyzed for different levels of ambiguity of the act. Operating instructions for the elicitation of the reservation price for ambiguity resolution in an experimental setting are provided at the end of the article. (shrink)

In the scholarship and discourse on French republicanism, it has become something of a received wisdom that the distinct, yet amorphous concept of laïcité in the French history of thought is set apart from the political liberalism of the Anglo-American world. While embracing the separation of religious and civil authority, laïcité is also associated with a highly abstracted and unitary ideal of citizenship, seeking to commit religious, cultural and ethnic differences to the ‘private sphere’, and a formal equality of rights (...) that eschews the deterministic politics of ‘difference’. It is true that the origins of the ideal lie partly in the perfectionist zeal of the late 19th century—when the neologism ‘laïcité’ emerged—during which the anticlericalists of the Third Republic conceived constitutional secularism as a tool with which to emancipate the citizenry from servile, irrational belief-systems. Audard claims that even today, the ‘positivist epistemic’ basis of laïcité renders it unsuitable as a basis for public justification within the ‘political’ strictures of Rawlsian liberalism. I argue that this overlooks the very mixed ideological pedigree of laïcité in the French history of thought—its committal of religious identities to the ‘private sphere’ being compatible with the Rawlsian recognition of ‘reasonable pluralism’. Moreover, this juxtaposition also overlooks certain underexplored, Rawlsian resonances in the French republican history of thought. (shrink)

The dominant view on grieving processes throughout the twentieth century was based on the idea that grief ’s purpose is to loosen and finally sever the bonds with the deceased in order to set oneself free (free to enter new relationships). An expanded view, which aims at a more complete and more complex understanding of grief, corrected the former approach by arguing in favor of continuing bonds. The expanded view certainly fits better the meaning of attachment relations in human life. (...) So-called disenfranchised grief nonetheless reveals additional normative constraints in terms of (culturally varying) social control mechanisms taking effect with regard to expressions of grief. The present paper argues that duly considering the complex and ambiguous nature of grief, as well as its transformative power, requires challenging the standard view of disenfranchised grief. I propose an expanded view that is based on the idea that proponents of the standard view have failed to inquire into the equivocal meaning of a common conversation about “coping with grief ” (getting over it vs. getting along with it). Arguing in favor of an expanded account of disenfranchised grief by following the second reading (“getting along with grief ”) then requires acknowledging the inseparability of grief ’s existential depth and social implications. With a view to this inseparability, it is argued that coping with grief is a public (or even political) affair instead of a merely private experience. (shrink)

The study combines theories of myth, popular culture, structuralism and poststructuralism to explain the enormous appeal of Star Wars and Harry Potter. Although much research already exists on both stories individually, this book is the first to explicitly bring them together in order to explore their set-up and the ways in which their structures help produce ideologies on gender and ethnicity. Hereby, the comparison yields central insights into the workings of modern myth and uncovers structure as integral to the success (...) of the popular genre. It addresses academic audiences and all those wishing to approach the tales from a fresh angle. (shrink)

In contemporary contexts of digitalization, proliferating media, and generative AI, various “life hacks” are regularly recommended to disconnect and resist distraction, ranging from meditation to getting back to nature to unplugging. This paper traces contemporary concerns over “the attention crisis” into a longer signature — the frequently elided field of signification today referred to as “spiritual,” a signature which links attention to theories of deep personal transformation and technologies of the self. First, we examine historiographical issues arising in studies related (...) to the contemporary attention crisis, exposing the challenges of attending to attending. Second, we delineate how European-based Christian monasticism developed practices for disciplining “attention” in new institutional settings. We argue that this process was simultaneously bound to projections of Othering and to the cultivation of critical attitudes. In particular, we delineate how these medieval forms of Othering (in both “spiritualist” and “demographic” terms) were involved in practices of vigilance and attending that became indelibly etched in Christian empire-building through governing souls and violent persecutions. Tracing these genealogical trajectories retrieves recent elisions of the complexities in problematizing attention. We suggest that contemporary ways of thinking about and acting on an “attention crisis” in education are still marked by signatures of spirituality and their allied binaries, Othering logics, and ambiguities. (shrink)

This chapter examines how ambiguous language complicates communication by producing multiple interpretations for each word and phrase. It demonstrates that speakers and writers actively manage these ambiguities through context and tone, as illustrated by the example of the phrase “Cats sit.” The chapter underscores that miscommunication arises when interlocutors use words with differing meanings, leading to confusion in casual conversations and formal settings such as legal contracts. It highlights that experts and rhetoricians deliberately manipulate ambiguity to bolster their arguments (...) while inadvertently causing everyday misunderstandings. Finally, the chapter emphasizes that communicators persistently clarify and negotiate meaning, maintaining a dynamic balance between linguistic creativity and precision. (shrink)

Two principal sources of imprecision in legal drafting (vagueness and ambiguity) are identified and illustrated. Virtually all of the ambiguity imprecision encountered in legal discourse is ambiguity in the language used to express logical structure, and virtually all of the imprecision resulting is inadvertent. On the other hand, the imprecision encountered in legal writing that results from vagueness is frequently, if not most often, included there deliberately; the drafter has considered it and decided that the vague language best accomplishes the (...) purpose at hand. This paper focuses on the use of some defined terminology for minimizing inadvertent ambiguity in the logical structure of legal discourse, where desired by the drafter. The current set of signaled structural definitions that are included in the A-Hohfeld language are first set forth and their use is illustrated in an extensive example from the treaty establishing the European Economic Community. The use of definitions in legal writing is widespread, butaddressed almost exclusively to controlling the vagueness of substantive legal terms; they are seldom used for structural purposes. Furthermore, their use in American legislative drafting is unsignaled. Here, attention is devoted to the relatively-neglected domain in legal discourse of imprecisely expressed logical structure, and the remedy offered, where desired by the drafter, is a set of signaled structuraldefinitions for use in controlling such imprecision. (shrink)