"Homonym fallacies"
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Original Question
Is there a Homonym Fallacy, i.e. two words that are spelled differently, mean different things but are pronounced the same?
For example:
"The reign in Spain was different 60 years ago." Different regime.
"The rain in Spain was different 60 years ago." Climate change?
Answers
3You'd simply ask the person to clarify what they mean.
Unless they are being dishonest, you'll get a straight answer - in this case, either reign (as in period of time when a person ruled) or rain (meteorological phenomenon).
I don't know if there's a specific fallacy, it would just be deceit otherwise.
The fallacy of equivocation is the fallacy of switching between 2 definitions of a word.
Polysemous words and homographs constitute a known problem for both language learners and rational discourse. In the case of what I would assign as the relevant fallacy here (equivocation), what makes a term “ambiguous” does not define the fallacy but the “usage of ambiguity” itself.
As such, a fallacy of equivocation occurs when a key term or phrase in an argument is used in an ambiguous way with misleading results.
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