 Philosophers’ interest in ambiguity stems from several sources, ranging from an intense interest in logical representation to pragmatic, political and ethical concerns about how we use language to communicate. An example of the first concerns regarding the regimentation of natural language in formal logic: arguments that may look good in virtue of their linguistic form in fact can go very wrong if the words or phrases involved are equivocal. It would be logical folly, for example, to conclude from the true (on one reading) sentences ‘All bachelors are necessarily unmarried’ and ‘Adam was a bachelor’ that Adam was necessarily unmarried. In other words, philosophers have often found ambiguity the sort of thing one needs to avoid and eradicate when they do their serious philosophical business. Frege worried about the phenomenon enough to counsel against allowing any multiplicities of sense in a perfect language. An example of the second may be found in the infamous case of Smith vs. United States in which the law stipulated that a weapon used in the main question was whether the law proscribing penalties for using a firearm in committing a crime applied to weapons used as items of exchange for drugs.