Elementary Logic; With Special Application to Methods of Teaching (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III.-AMBIGUITY 13. How Terms Come To Have Different MeanIngs.?Our ideas are far more numerous than the vocabulary that we command for their expression. Hence we are put to the necessity of using the same terms to symbolize different ideas. This tendency is increased by our habit of using figurative language in poetical and dignified modes of expression. Then again language is full of "faded metaphors"?by which are meant figurative expressions that have, in the course of time, become so trite as to have lost their character as figures of speech. Nearly all our terms for ideas that are not the direct product of sense-perception are of this character. For example, such terms as impression, conception, etc., reveal in their etymology their character as faded metaphors. This use of terms to express more than one idea is a great enrichment of our power of expression; for without it many of the ideas we have could not be communicated to others. But unfortunately it greatly increases the liability to confusion of meaning. This is, of course, a logical rather than a grammatical or rhetorical difficulty; and since logic must accept the form of language as given by usage, the only thing it can do is to suggest cautions against ambiguity, and to impose certain pracdeal rules for securing singleness of meaning as long as a term is employed in one and the same discourse. 14. Definitions.?A univocal term is one which suggests to the mind only one possible meaning. There are relatively few such words in the language. Scientific and technical terms furnish the best examples. Indeed, science marks its advance largely by the ability of its followers to determine and establish a nomenclature, i. e., a technical vocabulary that is univocal. Such words as quinine, arc-light, eau-de-col...