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Lack of clarity in meaning
- Vague and ambiguous words lead to the most common types of verbal disagreement. Vagueness refers to a lack of clarity in meaning. For example, Go down the road a ways and then turn right is vague because “a ways” does not precisely explain how far one should go down the road.
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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.
Like so much in contemporary philosophy, the sorites paradox can be traced back to the ancient Greeks; Eubulides is usually credited with what has been called ‘the problem of the heap’. Consider the following argument involving the vague predicate ‘is rich’: 1. A person with £5,000,000,000 is rich. 2.
May 7, 2021 · Classically, vagueness has been considered something bad. It leads to the Sorites paradox, borderline cases, and the (apparent) violation of the logical principle of bivalence. Nevertheless, there have always been scholars claiming that vagueness is also valuable.
- David Lanius
- 2021
When vagueness is characterized in terms of borderline cases, blurred boundaries, and Sorites‐susceptibility, all the main existing types of theory of vagueness can be seen as accommodating vagueness.
Vagueness is commonly diagnosed by a predicate's ability to give rise to the Sorites paradox. Vagueness is separate from ambiguity, in which an expression has multiple denotations.
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 ...
Jun 29, 2011 · Introduction. Much, or perhaps all, of natural language is vague: the concepts expressed in natural language seem to have unclear boundaries. A central example is that of “heap”—as grains of sand are removed from a heap, at what point does it cease to be a heap?
