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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.
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.
- 1 Meaning, Use, and Epistemicist Theories
- 2 Meaning, Use, and Contextualist Theories
- 3 Meaning, Use, and Indeterminist Theories
As already noted, the main target of Burgess and Weatherson in formulating this challenge is epistemicism, and both theorists conclude that epistemicism fails – that is, there is nothing in our use of vague predicates that could underlie their having a single, precise borderline between those applications that receive truth as semantic value, and t...
The situation with regard to the connection between meaning and use is even worse for the contextualist, at first glance, than it is for the epistemicist – after all, the epistemicist is faced with explaining how our usage of a vague predicate such as ‘bald’ can secure a single precise boundary between instances of the predicate and non-instances o...
It might seem that the indeterminist theorist, unlike the epistemicist or the contextualist, has little problem here, since indeterminist theories are motivated by the need to do away with sharp borders between instances where a vague predicate clearly applies and instances where that same vague predicate clearly does not apply – thus, the indeterm...
- Roy T. Cook
- Cookx432@umn.edu
- 2011
May 7, 2021 · Something very similar can be said for another argument that might be made for the value of vagueness. Because the world is fuzzy and we want to correctly and adequately represent the world, we should use vague language. (1) It is desirable to correctly and adequately represent the world. (2) The world is fuzzy.
- David Lanius
- 2021
structural characteristics, while vagueness involves uncertainly about the actual meanings of particular terms. This article examines ambiguity and vagueness in turn, providing a detailed picture of their empirical characteristics and the diagnos-tics for identifying them, and explaining their significance for theories of meaning.
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Russell defined vagueness as a one-many relation between an expression and its meaning. In an ideal language, the relation would be one-one. And indeed, artificial languages typically eliminate ambiguity and vagueness by the same token. Various explanations have been proposed to rationalize the vagueness of ordinary language, however.
