SOCI 3810 Lecture Notes - Lecture 12: Syntactic Ambiguity

• School: York University
• Department: Sociology
• Course: SOCI 3810
• Professor: Philip J Boyle

Document Summary

Violates the acceptability criteria for a good argument. One who presents an argument for or against a position should attempt to use reasons that are acceptable by a rationality mature person and that meet standard criteria of acceptability. Te acceptability criteria are when all premises are directly related to the truth and falsity of the conclusion or must have direct bearing on the conclusions. Words, regardless of how they are chosen, are always a potential source of misunderstanding. For example, a change in context can cause a sublet change in the meaning of a word or even a whole sentence. If careful attention is not given to this phenomenon our arguments may be ineffective and be misunderstood or even cause or even cause others to draw unwarranted conclusions. Therefore, anyone who is interested in good reasoning must attend to the ambiguity or imprecision of our language.