date

6 Oct. 1814 Section 1 '.2 Logic or
6 Oct. 1814 Section 1 '.2

Logic or Language

Ch. Qualities

Rules

1. Terms

1

1

Rules for the avoidance of ambiguity, obscurity, and debility, so far as depends upon the choice of words taken singly.

I. When the language affords a word appropriated exclusively to the expression of the import which alone it is your intention to express, avoid employing any word which is alike applicable to the expressing of that import, and a different one which may require to be distinguished from it.

Substantives - adjectives - adverbs - in the instance of all these parts of speech, frequent breaches of this rule may be found.

I. Substantives.

1. The word taste

employed instead of the word relish. To

relish a thing is to taste it with pleasure. Do you relish this peach ? In this question there is no ambiguity, not even for a moment. But instead of this, oftentimes defined - Do you taste this peach ? and so in the case of almost any other source of pleasure; for example, a poem, a sonata, a building, a landscape.

In the French language there exists no appropriate word by which pleasure is represented as an accompaniment of the perception indicated; no word expressive of, I taste with pleasure. Gouter is to taste; and for, to relish, there is again this word and no other. In French, therefore, this imperfection, this ambiguity and inadequacy, this incompleteness, and consequent incorrectness of expression, is the result of necessity. In the word taste, when employed instead of the word relish, this imperfection is needlessly and inelegantly copied. Why ? Answer - from affectation and vain glory, to give the hearer or reader to understand that the speaker or writer is so well acquainted with that foreign language, that it is more readily present to his memory than his own language.

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    1. Either employed instead of each.

    To the word either belongs an exclusive signification, which belongs not to the word each. Where the idea of exclusion is not intended to be conveyed, how slovenly and absurd is it not to employ a word by which the exclusion is expressed ? Yet of negligence in this shape, examples are continually occurring.

    Poetry is the species of composition in which it is most frequent. There it has its excuse - 1. In cases where the monosyllable each would not, so it may be that the dissyllable either will suit the measure. 2. In poetry, distinctness is less requisite than in prose. A uniform distinctness would even be incompatible with the nature of the composition, and fatal to the design of it. To produce and keep up in the mind, confusion, so it be but accompanied with pleasure, is an object not of aversion, but of endeavour and study.

    To affectation may the sin against propriety be imputed in this case, as well as in the last preceding one.

    In saying taste when he means relish a man pleases himself with the thought of showing how familiarly he is acquainted with the language of France.

    In saying either when he means each a man pleases himself with the thought of showing how familiarly he is acquainted with the language of poetry.

    Affectation the genus, pedantry the species; formerly the dress most frequently worn by pedantry was Greek and Latin; latterly, it is French and poetry.

    To the ambiguity attached to this impropriety, one circumstance alone operates in some measure as a palliative. If so it be, that for predicating what you meant to predicate alike of two things, A and B, the word you have employed is a word by which one of them is excluded; conceive the word repeated, then, one after the other, they are both of them comprised. First introduce A without B, then introduce B without A - both of them are introduced; but how much better would it not be if, without any such unintended exclusion, both were introduced at once.

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  • Title: [7 Oct. 1814 Logic or Language]
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    5. Ordinals: more especially the word first.

    Of the aptitude of this term to involve in ambiguity the import of the sentence in which it is employed, the causes are of the same nature in this instance, as in that of the restrictives, alone and only, viz. -

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    Example of the mode in which the ambiguity may be avoided.

    1. Ambiguous expression - Columbus first saw Hispaniola.

    2. Correspondent pair of sentences, by which the existence of the ambiguity, and at the same time, the mode of avoiding it, are indicated.

    1. Columbus was the first person who ever saw Hispaniola.

    2. Of the islands now called the West India Islands, Hispaniola was the first that Columbus discovered.

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    With equal right, two distinguishable, though nearly related qualities may claim to be represented by this word, viz. exemption from ambiguity, and exemption from obscurity, both of them negative ones.

    1. The case in which ambiguity has place is where, after the discourse has presented itself to, and has been received by, sense, two distinguishable, and accordingly distinguished imports, between which the judgment hesitates, unable to determine which of the two it was that was intended should be presented and received.

    By the strict and original import of the word ambiguity, the number of these imports is confined to two, - but in its application this explanation may be extended to any greater number of imports, so as they be determinate. In practice it is seldom between more than two that the mind will have to hesitate.

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