When stereotypical inferences prevail in polysemy processing: Explaining fallacies of equivocation

This paper develops and examines the first psycholinguistic explanation of fallacies of equivocation. On this basis, it addresses questions about polysemy processing. The paper proceeds from a case study on fallacies involving polysemous appearance verbs. Three studies provide evidence that subordinate uses of these verbs are interpreted through selective suppression of features from an event knowledge schema that overspecifies the relevant information, and that a comprehension bias interferes with the execution of this strategy and prevents the contextualisation of stereotypical inferences from the verbs. These contextualisation failures result in fallacies of equivocation, e.g., in philosophically influential “arguments from illusion”.