ABSTRACT
Everyone quotes the passage about the arrangement of the seven types of ambiguity being “intended as stages of advancing logical disorder” (Seven Types, p. 48), but no one has remarked that the expression itself harbors several ambiguities of the third type, with “two ideas…given in one word simultaneously” (ibid., p. 102). No fewer than three of the words prepare us to witness the case history of a chronic disease; and of course this disorder as it advances plays havoc with logic, making it sick or deranged if you oppose the process or healthily unstable if you approve. But it could be that the disorder itself is what is logical: a rigorously consistent irregularity or a madness yielding its secrets to method, depending on whether the logic stands revealed by the ambiguity or by the analyst, respectively. The logical disorder may “advance” in keeping with its own nature, hence according to a logic, suggesting at least an orderly sequence mediating the confusion; or it may be advanced as one advances a hypothesis, either in sequence or more interconnectedly; either in “stages,” that is, pausing to change horses, or staged in such a way that every meaning of every word seems spoken by a different actor.1 In sum, we cannot be sure just what Empson means. There is evidence in Seven Types and elsewhere for every one of the senses teased forth here, singly or together, and for all the unresolved contradictions among them.
