Beautiful Speeches Provide Almost-Guaranteed Ambiguity

Finding ambiguity as a prelude* to critical thinking is fun and relatively easy as long as we examine only those materials containing arguments we dislike.

But to challenge ourselves and our students, select a political speech that you admire as an exercise in identifying ambiguity.  In my case, for example, I might choose Franklin Roosevelt’s call for a 2nd Bill of Rights.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwUL9tJmypI

This clip reveals Roosevelt’s masterful selection of metaphors and frames to propose legislation that was and is quite radical for typical Americans, then and now. Roosevelt was far out front of contemporary marketers and linguists who counsel political parties to select their words based on an understanding of how those words resonate and construct imagery in the minds of typical Americans. See, for example:Frank Luntz, Words that Work and George Leikof, Don’t Think of an Elephant.

However, at each instance when President Roosevelt discusses the objective of particular pieces of legislation, his speech meshes effectiveness with what I can only presume is intentional ambiguity. He knows there are multiple conflicting meanings of those value-laden terms that he uses to herald the needs and objectives for his proposed 2nd Bill of Rights. He also knows that wrapping his political inclinations in certain ambiguities maximizes their emotional credibility (if that construct does not improperly intermix cerebral hemispheres).

Identifying this artfulness in his argument is harder work for me because I embrace his argument. But what a fruitful exercise for our students to watch us struggle with a reluctance to point out how intellectually sloppy the President is being.

*I say “prelude” because the discovery of ambiguity is not by itself a critical thinking move. To transform the discovery of ambiguity into a productive instance of evaluation, we need to suggest alternative definitions that have different dispositive effects on the reasoning.  In other words, if the ambiguity does not alter the meaning of the reasoning, regardless of what form  the ambiguous word or words take, then the ambiguity is more an annoyance than a flaw in the reasoning.