Despite modernity’s love affair with rationality and the precision that supports it, ambiguity persists not only in humor and politics but in all areas of contemporary life including scholarship and science. Here the authors explore how knowledge cultures differ in their precision of expression and the consequences of ambiguity for those cultures. They develop, estimate, and validate a model of ambiguous expression from large-scale publication data and then show that ambiguous scholarly language acts like a boundary object between researchers and their communities, drawing competing interpretations into conversation with one another as they build on it. Ambiguity, and the uncertainty that follows, stimulate social learning and so ironically play a crucial role in focusing modern knowledge and creating zones of social and intellectual engagement.

中文翻译：

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歧义和参与

尽管现代性对理性的热爱以及支持它的精确性，但歧义不仅存在于幽默和政治中，而且存在于当代生活的所有领域，包括学术和科学。在这里，作者探讨了知识文化在表达精确度方面的差异以及这些文化的歧义性后果。他们从大规模出版物数据中开发、估计和验证了一个模棱两可的表达模型，然后表明模棱两可的学术语言就像研究人员和他们的社区之间的边界对象，在他们以此为基础时，将相互竞争的解释引入到彼此的对话中。歧义和随之而来的不确定性刺激了社会学习，因此具有讽刺意味的是，在聚焦现代知识和创造社会和智力参与区域方面发挥着至关重要的作用。