Why ambiguity important

Currently, studies appear in such specific and diverse areas as consumer perceptions Hazen et al. In addition, promising research is being conducted at the neurological level where the links between brain physiology, function, and the perception of ambiguous stimuli are becoming increasingly clear e.

Regardless of these advances, there is considerable work yet to be done in studying ambiguity tolerance as well as considerable interest in doing so. One convenient way to classify ambiguity tolerance research, like research concerning other traits, is to group studies into three categories: measurement, correlates, and predictive research.

The measurement of ambiguity tolerance has a long history and has been addressed by several scholars including Budner , Rydel and Rosen , MacDonald , Norton , and McLain , Excellent reviews of the measurement literature have been published by Furnham and Ribchester and Furnham and Marks However, there is still work to be done regarding measurement.

Although measures exist in several languages, there is a need for ambiguity tolerance measures in languages where there is not yet a measure. Many societies and cultures present interesting research questions but the lack of suitable measures in the missing languages makes such questions unanswerable.

A further need for measurement research arises due to advances in the understanding of brain function. We need measures that are directly constructed from this increased neurological understanding and that validly estimate individual differences in this response. Such research offers a possible avenue to measures of ambiguity tolerance that improve on the paper-and-pencil measures that now dominate related research.

A related need is the identification of types of situations that initiate the pattern of brain activity most associated with response to ambiguity. Among the correlates of ambiguity tolerance, there is considerable opportunity for research that identifies new correlates and links them through common characteristics. Finally, a broad need for additional research of the phenomena predicted by ambiguity tolerance exists.

There are many areas in which there are opportunities for investigation and it is reasonably safe to say such opportunities exist in all areas of social and psychological science. These vary from the effect of cross-cultural environments Caligiuri and Tarique, ; Bakir et al. Ambiguity tolerance may prove to be a useful variable for study in many fields of inquiry because of its theoretical role as a moderator of relationships between situational information and cognitive and behavioral reactions.

For example, because ambiguity is theorized as a condition of sensemaking Weick et al. This implies that ambiguity tolerance may not only vary among individuals in terms of reactivity to perceived ambiguity, but might serve to set the threshold over which sensemaking is motivated. The functional relationship between ambiguity tolerance and the threshold of reaction to situational ambiguity deserves study. Another domain in which ambiguity tolerance may provide valuable insights is in the connection of memories to decision making.

If so, this perspective suggests ambiguity is overcome using a gist and that ambiguity is not a large barrier to decision making in ambiguous situations. The ease with which that gist interpretation is formed may be influenced by aversion to ambiguity, that is, ambiguity tolerance, raising an issue for future research. In Social Information Processing Theory Salancik and Pfeffer, , perceived ambiguity motivates a worker to seek information from relevant others, such as coworkers, to provide interpretations of ambiguous work characteristics and form related and acceptable work attitudes.

Ambiguity tolerance may play a role in the phenomena that these, and other theories that depend on an assumption of situational ambiguity, try to explain. Career choice is a situation often infused with ambiguity. Previous researchers have considered, for example, whether the choice of practice area among medical students is influenced by ambiguity tolerance Matteson and Smith, The relative ambiguity of a career in home construction may be quite different from a career in the creative arts; therefore, future research might consider how the ambiguity tolerance of a job seeker influences choice of career based on the perceived ambiguity of the work associated with a career or of information available about that career option.

Another avenue for study is whether the ambiguity of tasks performed by members of an occupation influences the attractiveness of that occupation to prospective entrants. Still other researchers seek to understand the motivations of entrepreneurs who, arguably, face greater ambiguity about their work than people who are not driven to create their own organizations Begley and Boyd, Is ambiguity tolerance a core personality trait of entrepreneurs?

Does ambiguity tolerance influence the stress or satisfaction associated with entrepreneurship? Business planning and strategy present many opportunities for studying the effects of ambiguity tolerance.

One area of study regards the related concept of uncertainty. Perceived environmental uncertainty research has revealed that the benefits of good strategic planning, which depend on an accurate assessment of uncertainty in the environment of the company, are often undermined because of inaccurate assessments Lorenzi et al. This knowledge has not led to improvements in the accuracy of environmental uncertainty estimates.

More up-to-date research is warranted to determine whether this problem continues and, if it does, how it might be addressed. New product development is a business function of great importance. The development of new products is essential for businesses to grow and remain competitive.

High failure rates are attributed in part to the uncertainty and risk inherent in developing new products. The amount of risk and uncertainty changes during the product development process. Previous research has suggested that success of products is related in part to how companies manage ambiguity Frishammar et al.

Unstructured processes are recommended to handle environmental uncertainty Smith and Radeka, Ambiguity tolerance is related to new product portfolio decisions McNally et al. Research shows a relationship between remanufactured products being of lower quality and consumers being less willing to pay for them Hazen et al. Ambiguity tolerance is often cited as an important leadership quality Cohen and March, ; Huber, Furthermore, creativity is an important characteristic of new product development team members.

A connection between creativity and ambiguity tolerance has been proposed Lane and Klenke The preceding discussion suggests that future research examining the relationship between new product development team member ambiguity tolerance and new product development success is warranted. Marketing researchers are interested in consumer responses to marketing methods and instruments.

Ambiguity tolerance may moderate the influence of marketing information on consumer confusion and choice behavior Mitchell et al. The large amount of information with which consumers are deluged presents ambiguity which can be confusing but also offers an opportunity to study relatively non-threatening ambiguity, due to the voluntariness of choice, and how it shapes consumer choice behavior. The study of ambiguity tolerance in marketing becomes of significant importance, considering the choices available to consumers among competing brands Kefallonitis and Sackett, Current marketing and brand positioning techniques often confuse consumers Walsh and Yamin, ; Wang and Shukla, Research that identifies the sensitivity of an individual to brand ambiguity and to the type and intensity of information cues that eliminate brand ambiguity and aid consumers in distinguishing one brand from another is needed Sikkel, Such research would have both scholarly and applied value.

As an example, it would provide differential advantage to a brand such as Coca-Cola, if it could identify and deliver brand messages that fell below the level of ambiguity to which most consumers are sensitive and might discourage a favorable attitude toward the message. To date, research evidence is limited to advertising, where probability markers affect consumer brand attitude with regard to less involving services Banks and De Pelsmacker, , but points to the value of such research Richardson et al.

Further research highlights factors that affect tolerance in ambiguity such as: the effect of language differences Dewaele and Wei, ; Grace, , particularly as found in marketing Alden et al. Expanding ambiguity tolerance research is needed particularly in the influence on differential reactions to well-established and emerging brands. Results cannot be generalized, as the research sample needs to include a multinational pool and reflect cultural and language differences.

The Reviewer Xiaoyu Pu declares that, despite being affiliated to the same institution as the authors David L.

McLain and Efstathios Kefallonitis, the review process was handled objectively and no conflict of interest exists. The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Adorno, T. The Authoritarian Personality. Oxford: Harpers. Google Scholar. Alden, D. Brand positioning through advertising in Asia, North America, and Europe: the role of global consumer culture. Appelt, K. The Decision Making Individual Differences Inventory and guidelines for the study of individual differences in judgment and decision-making research. Bakir, A. Banks, I.

Involvement, tolerance for ambiguity, and type of service moderate the effectiveness of probability marker usage in service advertising. Operators have scopal interactions with quantifiers as well. The semantics of modal auxiliaries, adverbs, temporal modifiers and tense are the subject of much concern but one thing is clear: they have interactive effects.

If the modal is interpreted narrowly, the conclusion follows but P2 is false and so is the conclusion. There is a great deal of controversy over how scope is to be handled. Orthodoxy suggests movement of quantifiers at LF where quantifier scope is made explicit and unambiguous.

May is often cited as the canonical source for this — but it is worth nothing that in that work May treats some LFs as underdetermining some semantic scopal relations. The situation is less clear with temporal and modal and other operators: many semantic theories treat tense and temporal adverbs as quantifiers, while some treat modal expression in this manner.

Other treat them as the operators or adverbs they appear to be. One respectable semantic tradition sees P2 as ambiguous, for example, between:. In regimented English: Every world is such that every bachelor at that world is unmarried at that world. In regimented English: Every bachelor at a world is such that at every world he is a bachelor. On the first reading, the world-quantifier takes wide scope. On the second, the bachelor-quantifier takes wide scope and the world variable is unbound. On the operator treatment, we dispose of quantification over worlds and let the predicates be interpreted relative to the operators, perhaps as a matter of movement, perhaps by other semantic means.

Negation has similarly been argued to present interesting scope ambiguities see Russell for an early example of a philosophical use of this type of ambiguity. The following, according to Russell, is ambiguous:. Russell claims that 13 and 14 are ambiguous between a reading on which negation that scopes over the sentence as a whole and one reading on which it scopes under the determiner phrase and over the predicate though see Strawson See also Neale The development of logics capable of handling multiple quantification was an achievement in part because they could sort out just this sort of linguistic phenomenon.

One final note: even in the domain of scopal ambiguities, there are controversies about whether to treat some of these apparent ambiguities as ambiguities. Bound and unbound readings of pronouns give rise to similar problems, though whether this is a semantic, syntactic or pragmatic ambiguity has been the source of heated debate.

Static semantics usually treats the distinction between bound and free pronouns as a fundamental ambiguity; dynamic semantics relegates the distinction to an ambiguity in variable choice see Heim , , and Kamp The phenomenon is subject to syntactic constraints.

We have a good idea of the conditions under which we can fail to get bound readings, as characterized by binding theory.

However, the impossibility of these readings demonstrates constraints on interpretation. Pragmatics has been claimed to be the study of many different things; but for our purposes we can focus on two: speech acts and truth conditional pragmatics. Speech act theory is complicated and it is not easy to offer a neutral account of the typology or interpretation of speech acts. And these are just examples of speech acts that are conventionally tied to these sentence forms.

Many, if not all, sentences can be used in multiple ways. Interestingly, these ambiguities are not always signaled by the content of the sentence. For example the following differ in their potential for use in speech acts though they seem to express similar content:.

Some creativity may allow 19 to function as a request but it is very difficult compared to As such, some theorists have been interested in trying to determine whether sentence types constrain the speech act potential of utterances of them see Murray and Starr for an overview.

An interesting case of ubiquitous potential ambiguity is the notion, suggested by Donnellan , that the apparent referential use of some sentences with definite descriptions. Donnellan writes:. Kripke and Searle p. But the intuition that perhaps pragmatics has a great role to play in interpretation than merely an account of inferences licensed by the needs of conversational coherence has lead philosophers to consider what ambiguity that resides in the interface of semantics and pragmatics might look like see Recanati But that need not be the case: it may presuppose that Maria solved the problem as well as having done something else, as in:.

Everything which is healthy is related to health, one thing in the sense that it preserves health, another in the sense that it produces it, another in the sense that it is a symptom of health, another because it is capable of it. For example, your diet may be healthy not because it is failing to suffer from a disease but because it promotes your health.

Your doctor may tell you that you have healthy urine on account of it being a positive indication of your health. Another interesting ambiguity is the collective-distributive ambiguity that occurs in the case of some predicates with certain quantificational or conjunctive antecedents. They also have distributive readings involving as many liftings of the piano as there were politicians and at least two different deal brokerings respectively.

See section 4. Consider the bound reading of the first sentence. There is a long-standing debate over whether the mechanism is primarily one of copying over at LF Fiengo and May , the result of expressing a lambda-abstracted predicate Sag, ; Williams, or the result of centering on a discourse referent see Hardt and Stone Montague Montague held to a policy of holding fixed the semantic type of lexical items by their category, so that names, falling in the same category as quantifier phrases, were assigned the same type as quantifier phrases.

Otherwise, he reasoned, there would be a type mismatch when we conjoined names and quantifier phrases. Others, however, have been content to posit ambiguities in type for one and the same expression.

The semantics is carefully rigged so as not to make a truth-conditional difference; but there is ambiguity nonetheless in what names literally express. There are alternatives. Similar considerations hold for verb phrases. Whether or not there is an ambiguity present in such cases is likely to be determined by very high level considerations, not by competent speakers ability to detect a difference in intuitive meaning.

Some terms are ambiguous between a generic and non-generic reading, and the sentences they play into are similarly ambiguous between the two readings.

The ambiguity can be located with certain predicates as well:. The habitual reading describing how John favored utensil for eating breakfast vs. This could encourage one to posit an ambiguity or a polysemy since the putative lexical entries are closely related. Whether or not the term is ambiguous lexically depends a great deal on which theory of the inchoative turns out to be right. Yet another systematic seeming ambiguity corresponds roughly to the type-token distinction that philosophers cherish, though it is more general.

Philosophers have noticed that 35 is ambiguous between a type and a token reading:. How closely they have to correspond in similarity is an open question. But interestingly, the two senses cannot always be accessed felicitously:.

One cannot read 36 as saying, say, that my Honda hit another Honda. The phenomenon is quite wide-spread, however See Hobbs David Lewis used the idea of a universal grinder reported by Pelletier in his to suggest that we can make sense of mass uses of substantive count nouns — apply the imaginary grinder to, say, three guitars and you can then make sense of:. The applicability of the universal grinder, moreover, is not linguistically universal in its ability to imbue one and the same noun with a mass interpretation.

See Doetjes for discussion. Much recent work has gone into trying to give informative explanations of the oddity of discourses such as:. But the point is that the search for discourse relations that help settle pronominal reference is good evidence that the discourse relations are part of your linguistic knowledge, not just a reflect of cooperative conversation and maxim following or flaunting.

The study of discourse relations has flourished into a large literature in the last 20 years but the relevant point for us is that it looks like 43 is ambiguous as a discourse.

This type of ambiguity is fairly novel and much work is still needed to get clear on the number and nature of possible relations that provide the possible resolutions of ambiguities like Detecting Ambiguity Now that we have separated types of ambiguity, we may reasonably ask how we tell when a term or phrase contains an ambiguity.

Nevertheless, we can make some progress. These tests generally depend on the presence or lack of interpretations and on judgments regarding the ridiculousness of interpretation the absurdity of the meaning is known as zeugma — though it should probably be known as syllepsis.

These judgments can be difficult to make, especially in tricky philosophical cases, so we must treat the results of the tests with care. A standard test for ambiguity is to take two sentences that contain the purportedly ambiguous term and conjoin them by using the term only once in contexts where both meanings are encouraged. The reduced sentence is zeugmatic for obvious reasons. The test is limited in one way.

If a term can be ambiguous but in a way so subtle that competent speakers may miss it, then the zeugma might not be noticeable. If multiple interpretations are impossible, there is evidence of ambiguity. As mentioned above, conjunction reduction has been used to argue that collective-distributive ambiguities are due to an ambiguity in the subject phrase.

Using conjunction reduction on 52 and 53 we get:. The test has certain weaknesses. On that note, the test will judge demonstrative and indexicals to be ambiguous since they are famously not generally conjunction reducible. Similar worries concern polysemy and ambiguity, which conjunction reduction may be overly sensitive to See Viebahn for relevant considerations. Similar features hold for structural ambiguities:.

This suggests a real ambiguity in the scope of the two quantifiers. This test has led people some philosophers to surprising results. For example, Atlas argues that the acceptability of the following suggest that negation does not interact scopally with descriptions in the ways we have come to expect:.

The purported availability of both readings suggests that sentences with negation s and descriptions are sense-general rather than ambiguous, contradicting many standard assumptions about the available truth conditions these structures should make available. Another way to test for ambiguity is to test for lack of contradiction in sentences that look to be contradictory.

However, compare:. Both sentences are rather awkward but only one is doomed to life as a contradiction. The tests can be used for most of the other types of ambiguity:.

It helps to provide a paraphrase afterwards to bring out the distinct senses. The tests can be used to detect lexical, structural and thematic ambiguity. Aristotle offers a test for ambiguity: try to construct a definition that encompasses both meanings and posit an ambiguity only if you fail. However, we can get a reasonable grip on what Aristotle had in mind. The test depends partly on how strict we are about what counts as a definition.

And on the assumption that there are interesting definitions to be had see Fodor Kripke, in his famous attack on Donnellan, suggests a few tests for ambiguity that are more conceptual in nature. In particular, he makes the following intriguing suggestion:. Why should the two separate senses be reproduced in languages unrelated to English? First, then, we can consult our linguistic intuitions, independently of any empirical investigation.

Would we be surprised to find languages that used two separate words for the two alleged senses of a given word? If so, then, to that extent our linguistic intuitions are really intuitions of a unitary concept, rather than of a word that expresses two distinct and unrelated senses. Second, we can ask empirically whether languages are in fact found that contain distinct words expressing the allegedly distinct senses. If no such language is found, once again this is evidence that a unitary account of the word or phrase in question should be sought.

Kripke p. In other words, since lexical ambiguity should involve something like accidental homophony, one would expect that other languages would lexicalize these meanings differently. One may worry about this test, especially with respect to its ability to differentiating sense generality from ambiguity.

Zwicky and Sadock argue that sometimes the two or more putative meanings of a word are related by overlapping except with respect to one or more features.

Ignoring for now whether or not dictionaries manage to report analyticities is having a bushy tail really an analytic necessary condition for being a dog? As mentioned above, Pietroski and Hornstein make a similar point regarding syntactic ambiguities. If these sorts of factors can interfere, we will indeed have to apply our tests gingerly.

A problem for the conjunction reduction test involves the context-sensitivity of zeugma. As noted by Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk following Cruse , the following two are different in terms of zeugma:. These cases looks like a problem for the conjunction reduction test, depending on how one thinks we should treat the ambiguity in generics. One might think that this provides evidence against ambiguity in bare plurals.

As we suggested above, context-sensitivity, vagueness and indexicality are frequently thought to be different phenomena than ambiguity, requiring a different treatment than lexical proliferation or differences in structure. However, in context, it can be pretty easy to make them pass some of the tests for ambiguity.

For example, consider James, who wants to meet a man who is is tall for a philosopher, and Jane who wants to meet a man who is tall for a horse jockey who tend to be a fair bit shorter on average. Consider, James speaking to Jill and disagreeing over the relevant height required to be tall:.

Of course, putting focal stress on a word has semantic effects of its own. But we do have some evidence that running the tests requires controlling for variables. We see someone who looks like Smith but is Jones raking the leaves and someone else sees Smith the actual Smith raking leaves. Can we hear the following as non-zeugmatic? Search websites, locations, and people. Enter keywords to search for news articles: Submit. Browse By. The advantage of ambiguity. Cognitive scientists develop a new take on an old problem: why human language has so many words with multiple meanings.

Publication Date :. Press Inquiries. Press Contact : Caroline McCall. It gives us tools to deal with. Our least-refined intellectual tools try to eliminate ambiguity. Our best tools help us understand it. The humanities are a training ground for learning to coexist with multiple meanings.

Good fiction, for example, tries to portray reality accurately while retaining its inherent. But natural and social scientists will also tell you that one of their main jobs is to balance accuracy and ambiguity. Particle or wave? Nature or nurture? Warming or cooling? Helpful or damaging? Healthy or ill? Male or female? Free or constrained?

This is how sophisticated people think. A good university education helps you become sophisticated.