The Fallacy of Amphiboly

The fallacy of amphiboly is, like the fallacy of equivocation, a fallacy of ambiguity, but here the ambiguity is due to indeterminate syntactic structure. In the argument:

The police were told to stop drinking on campus after midnight.
So, now they are able to respond to emergencies much better than before.

there are several interpretations that can be given to the premise because it is grammatically ambiguous. On one reading it can be taken to mean that it is the police who have been drinking and are now to stop it; this makes for a plausible argument. On another reading what was meant is that the police were told to stop others (e.g., students) from drinking after midnight. If that is the sense in which the premise is intended, then the argument can be said to be a fallacy because despite initial appearances, it affords no support for the conclusion.

Retrieved from http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/fallacies/#CorFal

This was really interesting to me. I initially read and understood the passage as the police were the ones who needed to stop consuming the drinks after midnight, and therefore, they would be better able to respond to emergencies. I didn't realize that it could have been understood as the police needed to go patrolling and stop other people from drinking after midnight. So that instead of having to respond to a lot of incidents involving drunken people on campus, they can focus on other emergencies that may arise. Very interesting. How did yall interpret the passage?

Sabrina Oakes

The Fallacy of Equivocation

craigssenseofwonder.wordpress.com

The fallacy of equivocation occurs when a vague statement is used many times during an argument but has different meaning each time. For example, the fallacy above says that noisy children are a "headache", which is our vague statement. Our vague statement comes up again when it is said that aspirin will make a "headache" go away. It is fallacious to equate these two terms to each other because they were used in different contexts. The first context is metaphorical and uses the term headache to describe how difficult noisy children can be; the second is more literal, referring to a physical ache.

Hansen, Hans. "Fallacies." Stanford University. Stanford University, 29 May 2015. Web. 07 July 2016.