On Ambiguity

Are legislators the unacknowledged poets of the world?

I don’t ordinarily cover the Supreme Court, so I don’t know how many times to expect the word “ambiguity” to be uttered during oral argument. But 50 seems a lot. Listening to the live feed, my thoughts turned to the New Criticism and William Empson’s 1930 book, Seven Types of Ambiguity. Can you name them? Ron Rosenbaum can; he’s journalism’s leading Empson interpreter, and also its finest practitioner of close reading. (If you don’t believe me read his excellent latest book, In Defense of Love.)

Empson’s seven types of ambiguity are:

1.) “When a detail is effective in several ways at once,” for example, comparisons with multiple points of similarity.

2.) “Two or more alternative meanings are fully resolved into one.”

3.) “Two apparently unconnected meanings are given simultaneously,” as in puns.

4.) “Alternative meanings combine to make clear a complicated state of mind in the author.”

5.) “A fortunate confusion.”

6.) “What is said is contradictory or irrelevant and the reader is forced to invent interpretations.” See Kurt Anderson on Bill Ackman as unreliable narrator.

7.) “Full contradiction.”

What Empson describes is differences not only in kind but in magnitude, with ambiguity increasing gradually to the point of incomprehensibility. Empson was writing about poets, who’ve been described as the unacknowledged legislators of the world. Legislators are not the unacknowledged poets of the world; read any statute and you’ll quickly agree. But legislators do produce ambiguity. The most relevant categories are at the more extreme end of the Empson scale, e.g. 4, 6, and 7. (I skip 5 because nobody would ever call confusion in statutory language “fortunate.”)

The high court yesterday was concerned mainly with two types of ambiguity not on Empson’s list: Ambiguity on policy matters, logically best resolved by regulatory experts in the executive branch, and ambiguity on legal matters, logically best resolved by legal experts in the judiciary. The more you can define ambiguity as something having to do with jurisprudence, the more you can justify letting judges resolve statutory ambiguities, of which there are many. That translates into judges assuming greater power over regulatory agencies. Conservatives used to be against judicial overreach; now they’re its most enthusiastic cheerleaders. In my latest New Republic article, I observe how this played out yesterday at the Supreme Court. You can read it here.