ABSTRACT
The chapter reconstructs the so-called fallacy of equivocation from some passages of Aristotle’s Sophistical Refutations. Section 1 presents in outline the fallacy. Section 2 focusses on an example and offers a simple model involving two components for explaining how the fallacy works. These are speaker meaning and symbolic reasoning. Sections 3 and 4 expand upon each of the two components and deal with the texts where Aristotle introduces them. Section 5 discusses a different interpretation of Aristotle’s account of the fallacy recently proposed by Susanne Bobzien in a contrastive reconstruction of the Stoic views on the same topic. The final section argues that the Stoic and Aristotle’s accounts might in fact be closer to one another than they appear.
