AMBIGUITY—UNCERTAINTY—AFFORDANCE
AMBIGUITY—UNCERTAINTY—AFFORDANCE

Summary/Abstract: The paper comments on three works titled Seven Types of Ambiguity (William Empson’s critical book of 1930, Shirley Jackson’s 1943 short story and Elliot Perlman’s 2003 novel), and another one titled Seven Modes of Uncertainty (2014) by Carla Namwali Serpell, i.e. four authors of four continents. Ambiguity is fundamentally rejected in science and philosophy, uncertainty is the subject of (drastic) reductions in communication theory, computer science, environmental studies, business/management, economics, engineering…, mathematics, and affordance is not as yet convincingly defined conceptually, but all three, as permanent resources of errors, imprecision, indeterminacies and unreliability, are richly and fruitfully present in literature; so the last author uses her modes of uncertainty to discuss ambiguity and affordance (less convincingly) and, paradoxically, uncertainty itself; consequently, this is a paper of uncertainty about ambiguity, uncertainty and affordance, after all.

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