Equivocation
Many words have more than one meaning. Equivocation is the use of more than one definition of a word or phrase so that a faulty conclusion is reached. This includes using a definition of a word in a quotation that is not the definite that the author intended. Equivocations range from the obvious, and even silly, to subtle differences that the author may not be aware of.
Examples
Rush to the rescue
Jan: Isn't that nice?
Dan: What?
Jan: Rush Limbaugh is going to help the earthquake victims.
Dan: Where did you here that?
Jan: It says so right here in this headline: "Rush to aid earthquake victims"
Dan: No, that means they are in a hurry to aid the victims, not that someone named Rush is going to help them.
Risky business
Bob: You should invest in my company.
Nob: No Way. It's too risky.
Bob: But you take risks every day. You even go rock climbing on your days off. Besides, my company is sound as a dollar.
Nob: You can't compare different kinds of risk that way. And your company is as shaky as the San Andreas Fault. When was the last time you had a profit?
Bob: Risk is risk. Anyway, I could make lots of money if all you investors weren't such chicken littles.
Nob: You're equivocating Bob. Physical risk is not the same as fiscal risk.
It's incalculable
Here John Rennie takes Bjørn Lomborg to task for taking the word "incalculable" out of context, and thus changing its meaning:
One of the most amazing passages in Lomborg's rebuttal is his answer to [Thomas] Lovejoy's accusation that he took a quotation from Paul A. Colinvaux out of context to distort its meaning. Lomborg wrote that "Colinvaux admits in Scientific American that the rate [of extinction in the tropics] is 'incalculable.'" As Lovejoy correctly indicates, the original sentence of Colinvaux's article says, "As human beings lay waste to massive tracts of vegetation, an incalculable and unprecedented number of species are rapidly becoming extinct." Colinvaux was using the word "incalculable" in the sense of "countless" or "vast," and nothing in his article suggests that he was "admitting" anything by using it.Clearly, Lomborg has misused the Colinvaux quotation, and one might assume that faced with this evidence, Lomborg would simply acknowledge the error. Instead, his rebuttal emphasizes that he was trying to make a larger point: "Here it is evident that I am trying to establish the fact that the vast extinction numbers are unsupported." Apparently, his defense is that it is okay to take someone else's remarks out of context and change their meaning as long as they make sense in the context of his own remarks.
He also writes, "Of course, Lovejoy would like me to quote that Colinvaux really does believe that the number is large, but this is a personal and unsubstantiated point." That remark might make sense if the word "incalculable" in Colinvaux's sentence had some greater factual basis and intent than all the rest, but that is not the case outside of Lomborg's imagination. Colinvaux was not even trying to quantify the extinction rate, so his calling it "in calculable" could not be meant as a statement about it.
Things to watch out for
There are several things to watch out for to avoid equivocation. One is to watch out for words that sound like they have the same meaning but actually don't, such as weather and climate, or counting and measuring. Another is to realize that the meanings of words have changed over time. For example, the expression "the exception proves the rule" originally meant that the exception tests the rule. It is now often interpreted to mean that the exception confirms the rule. Finally, as Joel Best points out in Damned Lies and Statistics using statistics from different sources often leads to inappropriate comparisons because the terms used mean different things.
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Written by Jim Norton
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