Wednesday, December 15, 2010

God forbade...must reading!

Semantic shift



    The fallacy of equivocation is often used with words that have a strong emotional content and many meanings. These meanings often coincide within proper context, but the fallacious arguer commits a semantic shift, slowly changing the context by treating, as equivalent, distinct meanings of the term.



The following sentence is a well-known equivocation:



    "Do women need to worry about man-eating sharks?", in which "man-eating" is construed to mean a shark that devours only male human beings.




Encyclopedia of Philosophy

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