Dictionary

amphiboly en · NOUN

Pronunciation

• /amˈfɪbəli/ (UK)

Etymology

From Old French amphibolie, from Latin amphibolia, from Ancient Greek ἀμφιβολία (amphibolía, “ambiguity”).

Meanings

1. (countable, rhetoric, uncountable) An ambiguous grammatical construction.
   • 1781, Kant, "Critique of Pure Reason," from John Meiklejohn 1855 translation Without this reflection I should make a very unsafe use of these conceptions, and construct pretended synthetical propositions which critical reason cannot acknowledge and which are based solely upon a transcendental amphiboly, that is, upon a substitution of an object of pure understanding for a phenomenon.
   • The language might be fraught with word ambiguity or sentence amphiboly. 1987, Jeffrey Buechner, “Radically Misinterpreting Radical Interpretation,”, in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, volume 45, number 4, page 410:
   • By logical errors I mean such simple things as Equivocation, Amphiboly, and Begging the Question. 1931, Adrian Coates, “Philosophy as Criticism and Point of View,”, in Philosophy, volume 6, number 23, page 339:

Forms

Deriveds

amphibology · amphibolic

Relateds

equivocation

Translations (6)

hi संदिग्धता (an ambiguous grammatical construction) · es anfibología (an ambiguous grammatical construction) · hi अनेकार्थकता (an ambiguous grammatical construction) · pl amfibolia (an ambiguous grammatical construction) · pl amfibologia (an ambiguous grammatical construction) · tl kabilaninsabi (an ambiguous grammatical construction)