Amphiboly

Refers to an ambiguous statement that is caused by an ambiguity in the grammatical structure.

For example:

“Police shot dead man armed with knife.”

This phrase can be interpreted in multiple ways, making it very hard to understand what actually happened here.

• Semantic Ambiguity
• Ambiguity fallacy
• Amphibology

Amphiboly is a form of equivocation and is often considered the equivalent to prosody, whereas the latter is more narrowly defined (every prosody is an amphiboly, but not every amphiboly is a prosody).

In practice, amphiboles that are not also prosodies are rare and the distinction is of little practical value. For more information, see the articles on prosody and equivocation.

There is a whole class of amphibolies that take the form “𝑋 do/are 𝑌 ”. These are superficially similar to logical categorical propositions, but lack the required quantifier, so it remains unclear whether these statements refer to all or only some elements of the extension.

This kind of statement is quite prevalent in political and social discourse – surely everyone has heard or read statements such as the following:

• The English are tea drinkers.
• The Dutch are bad drivers.
• Politicians are corrupt.
• Women are irrational.
• Men are rapists.
• Sicilians are mafiosi.
• Muslims are terrorists.
• etc.

The appeal of such ambiguous statements is that one can always choose the most appropriate interpretation in any given situation. This makes it possible to make provocative and possibly even discriminatory statements – and then easily talk yourself out of ostensibly having been “misunderstood”.

More on this in the article on generic generalisation.

• Equivocation
• Generic generalisation
• Syntactic ambiguity

• Amphiboly on Wikipedia
• Ambiguity Fallacy on Logically Fallacious
• Fallacy of amphiboly on RationalWiki