Aristotle on False Reasoning: Language and the World in the Sophistical Refutations

Chapter 2 Homonymy and Amphiboly

Chapter 2 Homonymy and Amphiboly INTRODUCTION: ARISTOTLE’S USE OF l°xiV Throughout this book I translate Aristotle’s word l°xiV by “language.” The generality of such a rendering I consider a virtue, for it is my task here to uncover Aristotle’s precise sense of the l°xiV/non-l°xiV dichotomy as it relates to sources of false reasoning. In the hands of later Greek writers on rhetoric and grammar, the term becomes increasingly narrowed to various technical specifications. Although Aristotle is one of the movers in that direction , it would be premature in this book (and historically anachronistic) to render his use of the word by one of the narrower terms of art that crystallized only after his death.1 It is relevant, however, to consider the general use of the term by his philosophical mentor. Plato uses l°xiV to refer to speech in several contexts. Sometimes it is contrasted to action (prøxiV);2 and sometimes it is contrasted to song (· ˚d–).3 More narrowly, it is used to refer to a particular style of speech, such as that appropriate to law courts4 or that used by poets.5 It is this latter sense of a style or way of speaking that dominates Aristotle’s use of the word in the Poetics and Rhetoric. Aristotle, like Plato, uses l°xiV chiefly for oral speech, not for writing. This distinction gradually fades as the written word gains importance within the oral culture of Greece. I argue below that we find in Aristotle’s fallacies of Composition, Division, and Accent reflections of just such a shift from language as an oral phenomenon to language as a written phenomenon. As a rule, however, Aristotle still considers oral speech the proper domain of l°xiV. Because the English word “language” combines the same dominant sense of speech with the secondary sense of writing, I prefer it as a rendering of Aristotle’s l°xiV. 19 20 FALLACIES DUE TO LANGUAGE THE SIX SOURCES OF FALSE REASONING DUE TO LANGUAGE (parΩ t‹n l°xin) There are, according to Aristotle, exactly six ways of producing the illusion of argument with language. They are: 1. Homonymy (˛mwnum√a) 2. Amphiboly (™mjibol√a) 3. Composition (s§nqesiV) 4. Division (dia√resiV) 5. Accent (pros¯d√a) 6. Form of the Expression (sc›ma l°xewV) Aristotle offers a cryptic defense of his taxonomy and its completeness: There is evidence of this [i.e., that these are the only six ways] both through induction and as a syllogism; if any other [syllogism] should be accepted there is also this one, that in just these many ways we might not signify the same thing by the same names and phrases.6 Presumably, the inductive evidence would consist in the inability to produce a false argument due to language that did not fit into one of the six classifications. The syllogistic evidence is less easy to reconstruct. We have here Aristotle’s first general characterization of the common source of illusory arguments dependent on words: “not signifying the same thing by the same words and phrases.” Perhaps, then, the syllogism that he has in mind would run like this. All failures to signify the same thing by the same names or phrases are due to these six phenomena. All illusory arguments due to language arise from failures to signify the same things by the same names and phrases. _________________ Therefore, all illusory arguments due to language arise from these six phenomena. Kirwan7 has claimed that the second premise is inconsistent with a later distinction that Aristotle makes among the types of fallacies due to language in S.E. 6. There he divides the six types into two subgroups. Homonymy, amphiboly, and Form of the Expression are due to double meaning (parΩ t¿ ditt¬n) wherein the same name or phrase signifies more than one thing. But Composition, Division, and Accent are “due to there not being the same Homonymy and Amphiboly 21 phrase, or the name being different.”8 In fact, there is no inconsistency here. The distinction between these two subsets of errors due to language will be detailed in this and the following two chapters. Briefly, errors of double meaning (i.e., homonymy, amphiboly, and Form of the Expression) occur when there is a failure to recognize that one and the same name (or...