Abstract
It strikes me that our current situation, at war against terrorism, conjures up a number of questions whose answers are not easy to identify, much less solve. As I have meditated on them at some length, I find in them one characteristic that defines them all, though in a negative way. All the situations we encounter right now are ambiguous. They have about them this negative character, that they cannot be clarified completely, that they defy compartmentalization. The term “ambiguity” comes from Latin ambo (“both”) plus agere (“to do”), meaning to entertain or attend to two instances at once, at the same time; hence the quandary; and yet some of them, like tolerance and peace, are being proposed as antidotes to fanaticism and therefore as subjects that should be taught and learned in the schools. Therefore I have thought it would be worthwhile to spend some time examining ambiguity as it appears in various garbs. My intention is not to analyze in detail each ambiguous situation, but to explore the ways in which ambiguity appears in each and all of them. This examination does not claim to be exhaustive…by definition, ambiguity excludes completeness, but it should be enough to base upon it some conclusions applicable to our educational endeavors.
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Götz, I.L. (2011). Vignetes of Ambiguity. In: Diasporic Philosophy and Counter-Education. Educational Futures Rethinking Theory and Practice, vol 48. SensePublishers. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-6091-364-8_12
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