Reflections on M.M. McCabe ‘First chop your logos: Socrates and the sophists on language, logic and development’
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Denyer, Nicholas
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We can perplex by hiding what we mean, and we can hide what we mean by saying things that can be taken in more than one way. Most obviously, there is so-called lexical ambiguity, where one word needs two entries in the dictionary: “He’s a funny man.” “Funny haha? Or funny peculiar?” There is also syntactic ambiguity: is the potential danger of which we are warned by “Hunting lions can be dangerous” a danger in our hunting lions, or in lions’ hunting us? A third kind of multiple meaning is that of pronouns: “Watch what you’re doing!” “Who? Me?” “Yes, you!” And while those examples are too straightforward to perplex long, subtler multiple meanings of these three kinds can generate fallacious arguments.
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Australasian Philosophical Review
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2474-0500
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