Polysemes in Hume and Smith
Polysemy: Wikipedia: "A polyseme is a word or phrase with different, but related senses."
Polysemy may give rise to contrarieties -- statements within a text that seem contrary to one another.
Donald Livingston (1984, 36) speaks of "contrarieties of thought which structure [a] drama of inquiry."
Hume and Smith draw us into dramas of inquiry using contrarieties that involve polysemes.
Smith's first publication was about polysemy and how best to instruct others in the polysemy of a word: For each meaning of a word, such as but or humour, provide a set of quotations all of which contain the word used with that meaning. One can then learn two meanings of but by comparing the two sets of quotations containing but.
Polysemes in Hume
nature, natural
justice
Polysemes in Smith