Re: Unambiguous languages (was: EU allumettes)

BP:
> At 07:02 5.5.2004, Ray Brown wrote:
>
> >Indeed, not - and humans being as we are, I think the aim to
> >eliminate all lexical vagueness/ambiguity is not realizable.
>
> I doubt that it is desirable.  I think the result would be
> a sterile beast, since human progress is generally a matter
> of patching the imperfect results of our predecessors.
> As for framing legal texts in an unambiguous language the
> thought is even scary.  There will always be borderline
> cases, and what happens to the prerogative of courts and
> judges to follow the spirit rather than the letter of law?
One can never eliminate vagueness, because this is where the
johannine dictum pertains -- that the price of infinite
precision (i.e. freedom from vagueness) is infinite verbosity.
But one can eliminate ambiguity & this would be a great boon
for legal texts. Linguistic ambiguities in legal texts
result from the shortcomings of the language and the writers,
who fail to notice the ambiguity or take necessary steps to
avoid or resolve it, and there is a whole body of law
pertaining to the resolution of such ambiguities (as I
discovered when I once acted as an informal consultant in a
lawsuit based on linguistic ambiguity in a contract).
Vagueness, though, is positively desirable for the reasons
you state: no law can possibly anticipate every circumstance
to which the law might potentially apply, and so there will
necessarily be borderline cases judged case by case,
perhaps leading to refinements of the law.

Vagueness arises mainly from words' definitions. Ambiguity
arises from homonymy and from the rules that combine
word meanings together to produce sentence meanings.

--And.