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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.
Dec 4, 2014 · What seem like vague terms – such as “bald” – are actually perfectly precise, however (and here’s the catch) although such terms do have precise definitional boundaries, we don’t (and cannot) know where these boundaries are.
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).
- David Lanius
- 2021
- Vagueness and Open Texture
- Vagueness and Generality
- Vagueness and Genericity
In propositions that manifest vagueness, indeterminacy emerges from the word to the use (word-use): something in the meaning formation of the word (tokenings, regularities, explanatory criteria) creates unclarity. On the other hand, in propositions that manifest open texture, indeterminacy emerges from the object to the use (object-use); there is a...
Comparatively, in propositions that manifest generality, indeterminacy emerges not from a word-use direction but from the plurality of propositional subjects or the plurality of word objects (plural subject/plural object-word). This is the case of general propositions like “All ravens are black,” which are characterized by a plurality of cumulative...
Finally, in propositions that manifest genericity, indeterminacy emerges not from a word-use direction but from space-time dependence (space-time-word). Genericity, much like generality, seems to be characterized by plurality of propositional subjects.Footnote 62 This leads to another frequent confusion—between generality and genericity, particular...
- Ana Escher
- anaescher@campus.ul.pt
- 2019
Many linguistic terms are vague. But of what exactly does their vagueness consist? Consider, for example, the term ‘bald’. This term has borderline cases of application. There are people to whom the term, as it is ordinarily used, neither clearly applies nor clearly fails to apply.
The ‘Problem of Vagueness’ is, fittingly, not one precise problem, but several related ones. A vague predicate can be defined in terms of boundarylessness (i.e., lacking sharp boundaries): F is vague if there are cases in which it is not determinate whether some particular x is F or not.
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The concept is seen to give rise to two main problems: the ‘soritic problem’ of finding a solution to the paradoxes of vagueness; and the ‘semantic problem’ of finding a satisfactory semantics and logic for vague language.
