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Sep 10, 2018 · In speech or writing, vagueness is the imprecise or unclear use of language. Contrast this term with clarity and specificity. As an adjective, the word becomes vague. Although vagueness often occurs unintentionally, it may also be employed as a deliberate rhetorical strategy to avoid dealing with an issue or responding directly to a question.
- Richard Nordquist
Sep 26, 2019 · It seems that soritical terms (“heap,” “bald,” “rich,” “tall,” “old”) and color terms (“red and blue”) can be quantitatively vague, while multidimensional terms (“crowd,” “elegant,” “beautiful,” “neglect,” “adequate,” “danger”) can be qualitatively vague.
- Ana Escher
- anaescher@campus.ul.pt
- 2019
Jul 11, 2012 · Other perspectives on vagueness should find interesting research opportunities by adapting Solt's main methodology of exploring extensions of theories to include vague quantifiers and other less studied vague terms.
Feb 8, 1997 · Vagueness is standardly defined as the possession of borderline cases. For example, ‘tall’ is vague because a man who is 1.8 meters in height is neither clearly tall nor clearly non-tall. No amount of conceptual analysis or empirical investigation can settle whether a 1.8 meter man is tall.
Feb 8, 1997 · If there is a vague object, then some statement of the form ‘\(a = b\)’ must be vague (where each of the flanking singular terms precisely designates that object). For the vagueness is allegedly due to the object rather than its representation.
Jun 29, 2011 · Some theorists (epistemicists) take vagueness to consist in speaker ignorance of certain semantic facts (such as the minimum number of grains in a heap); others take vagueness to consist in some form of semantic underdetermination (indeterminists), or in extremely subtle variations of context (contextualists).
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May 7, 2021 · In many situations, the vagueness of vague terms does not become a problem because there are no borderline cases and no risk of running into Sorites series. In other words, the vague terms are only potentially vague (there are possible borderline cases) but not actually vague (there is no borderline case in the given situation).
