Amicable Ambiguity: The Indispensable Value of Vagueness, Open-Endedness, and Uncertainty

(Hardback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

Often rejected out of hand as the enemy of clarity and convincingness, ambiguityin thought, speech, writing, analysis, or theoryshould not be overlooked. Donald A. Crosby explores the innumerable positive contributions of conceptual and discursive ambiguity in situations where ambiguity can be the amicable friend of intelligibility and convincingness rather than their sworn enemy. While people have been willing to acknowledge the positive role ambiguity can play in poetry, story, myth, ritual, oratory, and song, Crosby argues that its positive roles extend far beyond these modes of reflection and expression and into the whole of life. Amicable Ambiguity: The Indispensable Value of Vagueness, Open-Endedness, and Uncertainty shows how, why, and when this claim may hold true and needs to incorporated both across academic disciplines as well as in the more ordinary areas of thought and experience.

Reviews

Donald Crosby has presented an eminently accessible sequence of precise and rich chapters that examine the themes of ambiguity and vagueness in central dimensions of human life. Writing in a direct and personal manner out of a great depth of knowledge and existential commitment, Crosby shows by his example how philosophy can inform and structure our engagements with the variety of contexts, both existential and conceptual, in which we live out our lives in a mysterious cosmos defined by powers and forces that touch and challenge us in multiple ways and on multiple levels, encompassing not just our forms of interpreting the world but our individual and social existential practices.

Crosbys inquiry spans a broad area of topics to offer an accessible and compelling argument for why ambiguity is indispensable for vulnerable and finite beings such as us.

Author Bio

Donald A. Crosby is professor of philosophy emeritus at Colorado State University.