[lbo-talk] "Ambiguities"

[Carrol Cox]

There is no necessary linkage whatever between complexity and ambiguity
-- and several of the posts in this thread badly confuse the two.
(Neither is necessarily connected with difficulty or depth or either.) A
text can be simple but deeply ambiguous: "Mary, did you send my light
suit to the cleaners?" It certainly is profound or complicated, but Fish
demonstrated that there is simply no way to disambiguate it so that
light either unambiguously means "not heavy" (as in a summer suit) or
"not a dark color."

On the other hand, it would be simply silly to say there was any
ambiguity at all in one of the most wrenching and profound lines in all
of English poetry:

	Never, never, never, never, never.

And so on. The ambiguous may be easy to construe. The unambiguous may be
incredibly difficult to construe.

Carrol