Most concise way to describe information not guaranteed to be accurate? Missing or assumed details at fault?

Question

You may experience people doing this intentionally (to some extent) in law, politics, religion, or many different areas where they speak vaguely so that they are correct in at least one interpretation of their words. What you think they are meaning may not be the one way in which they are actually correct. Someone also may do this unintentionally where they use words with more than one meaning or they just overuse general nouns / personal pronouns (she went to that place to get some stuff). They may say "she went to the store" when you ask where someone is, but they might mean a different individual than the one you were asking about. Someone may speak with an assumed (but not explicitly defined) context. Statistics that are misleading due to no explanation of the data presented, like "4/5 dentists suggest X toothpaste" but it isn't mentioned how many dentists were asked, where these dentist offices are, if they were paid for their answers, etc.

Answer 1

You describe some of the common methods of vagueness one encounters from some speakers, yea even writers.

If you are asking how to scrutinize this, then the best response would be to locate the vagueness and ask precise questions that encourage and even pressure the speaker to recognize the vagueness and remedy it.

For example, you mention this: "Someone may speak with an assumed (but not explicitly defined) context." Given this, you can directly ask the speaker or writer to briefly but precisely explain the context s/he intends.

Answer 2

Great, great point! There are so many ways that people manipulate language in order to promote an agenda and this is one of their favorite in their bag of tricks. Someone used data like this to make his point that if everybody worked only 4 days a week that would greatly slow down global warming. Unfortunately much of the discourse today has been poisoned by the misuse or manipulation of words that you mention. Whenever I read the words you describe in an article, whether on the left or right, an alarm goes off in my head: "What is their agenda?" I don't get mad, but like a sleuth try to figure out what lies behind the use of those words.