Thursday, 11 March 2021

Using Language: Issues and Strategies

Logic and Critical Thinking

- We understand sentences through language and so logic and language are connecte
- Usage of language can create issues
- Two functions that language perform:
• It is used to convey information: The extent to which any statement conveys
informations, it is supposed to have cognitive meaning. Use of words like “records”,
name of a country, facts and gures etc used to convey some strong cognitive meanin

• It evokes emotions and feeling in people and help them express them. The extent to
which any statement conveys informations, it is supposed to have emotive meaning.
Words like cruel, inhuman, vengeful, slaughtered used to convey some strong emotive
meanin

- This becomes relevant to us because when we speak of logic, we speak primarily about
cognitive meaning. We need to disengage cognitive meaning of statements from their
emotive meanings. We should focus on the information content only. The emotive force
has no bearing on the logical relationships

- Cognitive meaning is actually the information covered by it. Emotive meaning is the
feelings or emotions it tries to bring in the reade

- Many errors of logic stem from a careless or imprecise use of language. It can happen from
ambiguity and unawareness

- 2 ways in which emotionally loaded language can create problems

• Loaded language can interfere with out attempt to understand the cognitive meaning of a
sentence. When this happens, one is supposed to rewrite the argument in a way that the
emotive element is separated and only the cognitive element remains which is then used
to understand the meaning of the argument

• Emotionally loaded language can blind us to the need for evidence. When positive
emotions are evoked, it is easy for us to simply accept those statements without asking
for evidence for it.

- For example when we read the word “harvest”, it is taken as a positive emotive force
as the rst thing that comes to our mind is agriculture and food supply. So when this
word is used for harvesting organs, the negative effect is nulli ed. Using “yank out”
instead of “harvest” presents a negative emotive affect. Using “remove” presents a
neutral tone

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- The argument should be selected on merit- validity/Soundness or strength/cogency, if these
criteria is not ful lled, the argument should not be accepte

- Advertisements frequently rely on emotive meaning. This is because

• They don’t have much time to convey information conten
• They realise they need to connect on an emotional level to convince customers to buy a
produc

Issues in using words

- Ambiguity: can interfere with out ability to properly understand the cognitive meaning of
an argument. There are multiple distinct interpretations of this word with no clarity of
which one is to be use

• Lexical ambiguity: a single word or term having more than one meaning in the
language. For example, if words like “critical” “sound” etc are used without a given
context, it hinders our ability to understand the cognitive meaning of the sentence

• Referential ambiguity: it is not clear which thing or group is being referred to. For
example “everybody” does not specify what group of people is included

• Syntactic ambiguity: two or more possible meanings within a single sentence or

sequence of word

- Vagueness: there are no distinct multiple interpretations but there is a single entire range of
interpretation with an unclear boundary. There are two sets of people on which a word can
be applied but there is a very unclear boundary between these two sets

• Some of these words are problematic because they can interfere in our ability to
understand the cognitive sense of the argument and hence evaluat

• A word can be both ambiguous and vague

• Not all cases of vagueness are problematic because it is understood that times and
contexts can change and so these vague words provides exibility for these words to be
interpreted in a way the situation at that time demands (example are the vague words
used in constitution which can be understood depending on the time and situation

• Vague terms can make a claim vague and impossible to con rm or disapprov
• Vagueness can be used by people at their advantage too since they are not committing to
anything by using a vague term. They do this to be non-committal or imprecise. For
example “i’m responsible to some extent”- at what extent do you become responsible is
not know

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- There are many forms of expression that are ambiguous in on context and vague in anothe
- Ambiguity and vagueness are important in logic because there are countless occasions in
which the evaluations of an argument leads to the observation, “well, that depends on what
you mean”. Debate is about what exactly is the meaning of a speci c term under discussion
in the argument.

- The role of these two in arguments may be conveniently explored in the context of
con icting arguments between individuals. Some speci c words causes dispute between
two people. It can either be vagueness or ambiguity of these words that there can be
different interpretations of these words and hence a con ict of opinion. For example, the
word “guilty” can be used in a moral sense as well as in a legal sense and so these two
distinct understanding cause a con ict of interest

- Types of disputes
• Verbal disputes: These dispute are centred n the difference in meaning of the words.
Many verbal disputes can be solved if the way way the word is to be used is speci ed

• Factual disputes: are different from verbal disputes. Here, the difference of opinions is
on facts and not meaning of words

- Ways in which these ambiguity and vagueness can be removed

• Lexical de nitions:
- Conventional/Established meaning of the word is used. The meaning that is in the
dictionary. These meanings are how majority of the people understand and de ne
the

- Lexical de nitions have a truth value- they are either true or false. When a established
conventional meaning is correctly used and reported, this means that the lexical
de nition is true. If it is not correctly reported, the de nition is false

- These remove ambiguity

• Stipulative de nitions
- De nitions used to assign new meanings to a term. This meaning is independent of
the conventional/established meanin

- People with different disciplines come up with new words. For examples, the word
“sel e” was once stipulated and gained attention and currency. If it becomes accepted
widely only then it becomes part of the lexicons

- They are neither true nor false as these are recommendations and suggestions

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- Stipulative definations are misused in verbal disputes when one person covertly uses a
word in a peculiar way and then proceeds to assume that everyone else uses that word
in the same way.

• Precising de nitions
- Combination of lexical and stipulative de nitions. It is lexical because it is not
entirely independent of the conventional meaning. But this lexical meaning does not
exactly draw a line and so the stipulative de nition is used to draw this line

- A precising de nition is intended to make a vague word more precise so that the
word’s meaning is not left to the interpretation of the reader or listener

- For example, lexical meaning for “old” is “somebody advanced in age” and the
stipulative meaning can be above “above 70”. Stipulative de nitions depend of the
persons using the

- They do not always resolve differences in opinion. They reduce vagueness of a ter
• Persuasive de nitions
- Those in which a speci c positive or negative meaning attaches an emotive, or
derogatory meaning to a term where it is none

- Puts a neutral word in a speci c biased negatively or positively slanted way, an

argument is presented and then convinces audience to believe

- When discussion happens around some speci c key terms, make sure you know the
established meanings of these terms before the argument is taken ahead. Otherwise
the argument takes a bias route in convincing the audience

- Although persuasive de nitions are often presented as objective and authentic, they
are convincing only if they are very well defende

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