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Despite previous attempts to clarify what we understand as ambiguity and to analyse its nature, research on the field reveals a lack of uniformity on its theoretical treatment, accentuated by a tendency to not to specify which are the commitments embodied in the proposed representation and resolution techniques. This paper analyses the phenomenon of ambiguity from a multidisciplinary perspective and in contrast to other semantic issues, in particular vagueness and generality as discussed in philosophy and polysemy and homonymy as in linguistics. The theoretical considerations are then briefly matched to the current trends in representation and resolution, concluding that the field could benefit from richer semantic representations and, fundamentally, from considering an unrecognised step: that of deciding, in context, whether there is something that need to be disambiguated or not.