Rhetorical ploys and fallacies British people prefer or like best, or (ii) that Britburgers is the hamburger restaurant with the most customers in Britain (or possibly that it's the one that sells the most hamburgers in Britain, or that has the most franchise outlets in Britain). Obviously the advertisers hope that we'll understand the message according to (i): this is much more favourable to the restaurant than merely having the most customers, since its market domination might be due to some factor other than actual customer preference. Now we might realise that Britburgers would risk prosecution if they made this claim knowing it wasn't true, and thus conclude that Britburgers really is actively preferred by more British hamburger-eaters. But there's the rub with equivocation: the slogan could be true without the proposition it expresses giving us a good reason to expect Britburgers' burgers to be any good, for the truth expressed by the slogan might not be the one we take it to be. The slogan might be true only under interpretation (ii), and not under interpretation (i). In that case the advertisers could not rightly be convicted of having said something false; they can always claim that (ii) is all that was intended. Another common instance of equivocation occurs when the ambiguity and vagueness of the phrase 'links to' is used rhetorically to imply that someone is involved in some kind of illegal or immoral activity (and is therefore a bad person). Suppose you read a newspaper article which reports that: Mr Smith, who is believed to have links to terrorist organisations, was seen boarding a flight at Heathrow Airport.
you may well be inclined to think that Mr Smith is a terrorist. But all that you have been told is that someone believes he has 'links to' terrorist organisations. These 'links' could amount to nothing more than his having visited premises belonging to such organisations, or he may have attended a meeting, or bought propaganda material, or done business with members of such an organisation, or simply have a relation who is involved in such an organisation. The ploy is also commonly employed using the phrase 'associated with', as in 'Mr Smith is believed to be associated with El Bayda'.2
2 Notice that the word 'terrorism' is itself vague in that the boundaries of what counts as terrorism are fluid and the meaning of the term remains contested. Public discourse about terrorism often involves trading on equivocation about the meaning of 'terrorism'. As the clichĂŠ goes, one person's terrorist is another's freedom fighter.
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