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Feb 8, 1997 · But then the vagueness is due to language, not the world. Despite Evans’ impressive assault, there was a renewal of interest in vague objects in the 1980s. As a precedent for this revival, Peter van Inwagen (1990, 283) recalls that in the 1960s, there was a consensus that all necessity is linguistic.
The vagueness so far discussed does not require vagueness in the world. But worldly vagueness can be treated in a similar way. Suppose, as we normally do, that there really is a nonlinguistic property of being red, a property expressed by the predicate ‘is red’. This predicate is vague and so is the property.
Abstract. This chapter introduces the philosophical concept of vagueness and explains its significance for contemporary philosophy. 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.
Aug 18, 2020 · Elizabeth Barnes and J. Robert G. Williams claim to offer a new ontic theory of vagueness, the kind of theory which considers vagueness to exist not in language but in reality. This paper refutes ...
At the same time, I think we should not jump to the conclusion that all the vagueness of language has an ontological origin. If the world were precise, language would remain vague, because reference is determined in ways that do not preclude indeterminacy. The existence of ontological vageuness does not let language off the hook.
Reflection on the origins and nature of vagueness in language suggests that the phenomenon is due to both the way the world is and the way that we, the users of language, and our faculties of representation are, and that there is no sense to separating those factors and attributing vagueness to one of them exclusively. This depends on some issues concerning metaphysics or, better, meta ...
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Jan 1, 2011 · The in rebus approach to vagueness, on the other hand, makes vagueness more of a metaphysical, and less of a language-oriented, phenomenon – one can imagine a possible world whose objects, properties, etc. were not in any way indeterminate, and, on the in rebus view, presumably our expressions would have the same meanings in this imagined possible world as they have in the actual world, yet ...
