The fallacies in this section are all cases where a word or phrase is used unclearly. There are two ways in which this can occur. (1) The word or phrase may be ambiguous, in which case it has more than one distinct meaning. (2) The word or phrase may be vague, in which case it has no distinct meaning.

Examples

"Imagine an author who sets out to prove that music glorifies violence but who spends most of the book fixated on gangsta rap and then attributes the vices of the latter to music in general. As already noted, this kind of mistake is called equivocation. Dawkins' rhetorical excesses and inattention to nuanced differences do not just make him susceptible to this fallacy. When he tries to make the case that religion is pernicious, Dawkins moves willy-nilly from an attack on particular religious doctrines and communities to conclusions about religion and belief in God generally. (Eric Reitan in Is God a Delusion?, pp. 22.)