Talk given at the Fourth World Congress of Paraconsistency (Melbourne)
Abstract. Non-dialetheic proponents of paraconsistency have often appealed to ambiguity to explain away the apparent acceptance of true contradictions in their paraconsistent approach to logical consequence. This can be done by referring to an ambiguity at the level of the logical or the non-logical vocabulary. The kind of ambiguity I’m interested in, relates the validity of explosion to the ambiguity of the classical connectives. (see e.g. Read (1981)).
While this is all fairly well known, it is generally not remarked that classical logic offers only one of two intuitively plausible ambiguous readings of the logical connectives. Namely, a reading which takes an ambiguous connective to exhibit the deductive features of the exten- sional and intensional connectives. Another option, however, takes each ambiguous connective that plays a role in an argument to exhibit (in a non-deterministic way) the deductive features of either an intensional or an extensional connective.
