Theories Of Vagueness
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Theories Of Vagueness
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Author : Rosanna Keefe
language : en
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Release Date : 2000-09-28
Theories Of Vagueness written by Rosanna Keefe and has been published by Cambridge University Press this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2000-09-28 with Language Arts & Disciplines categories.
A powerful comparative study of the main theories of vagueness, first published in 2000.
Vagueness As Arbitrariness
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Author : Sagid Salles
language : en
Publisher: Springer Nature
Release Date : 2021-03-12
Vagueness As Arbitrariness written by Sagid Salles and has been published by Springer Nature this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2021-03-12 with Philosophy categories.
This book proposes a new solution to the problem of vagueness. There are several different ways of addressing this problem and no clear agreement on which one is correct. The author proposes that it should be understood as the problem of explaining vague predicates in a way that systematizes six intuitions about the phenomenon and satisfies three criteria of adequacy for an ideal theory of vagueness. The third criterion, which is called the “criterion of precisification”, is the most controversial one. It is based on the intuition that a predicate is vague only if it is imprecise. The author considers some different definitions of linguistic imprecision, proposing that a predicate is imprecise if and only if there is no sharp boundary between objects to which its application yields some particular truth-value and objects to which its application does not yield that truth-value. The volume critically reviews the current theories of vagueness and proposes a new one, the Theory of Vagueness as Arbitrariness, which defines a vague predicate as an arbitrary predicate that must be precisified in order to contribute to a sentence that has truth-conditions. The main advantages of this theory over the current alternatives are that it satisfies all three criteria and systematizes the relevant intuitions.
Vagueness A Guide
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Author : Giuseppina Ronzitti
language : en
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Release Date : 2011-03-03
Vagueness A Guide written by Giuseppina Ronzitti and has been published by Springer Science & Business Media this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2011-03-03 with Philosophy categories.
This volume explores how vagueness matters as a specific problem in the context of theories that are primarily about something else. After an introductory chapter on the Sorites paradox, which exposes the various forms the paradox can take and some of the responses that have been pursued, the book proceeds with a chapter on vagueness and metaphysics, which covers important questions concerning vagueness that arise in connection with the deployment of certain key metaphysical notions. Subsequent chapters address the following: vagueness and logic, which discusses the sort of model theory that is suggested by the main, rival accounts of vagueness; vagueness and meaning, which focuses on contextualist, epistemicist, and indeterminist theories; vagueness and observationality; vagueness within linguistics, which focuses on approaches that take comparison classes into account; and the idea that vagueness in law is typically extravagant and that extravagant vagueness is a necessary feature of legal systems.
Vagueness And Degrees Of Truth
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Author : Nicholas J. J. Smith
language : en
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Release Date : 2008-11-06
Vagueness And Degrees Of Truth written by Nicholas J. J. Smith and has been published by OUP Oxford this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2008-11-06 with Philosophy categories.
In Vagueness and Degrees of Truth, Nicholas Smith develops a new theory of vagueness: fuzzy plurivaluationism. A predicate is said to be vague if there is no sharply defined boundary between the things to which it applies and the things to which it does not apply. For example, 'heavy' is vague in a way that 'weighs over 20 kilograms' is not. A great many predicates - both in everyday talk, and in a wide array of theoretical vocabularies, from law to psychology to engineering - are vague. Smith argues, on the basis of a detailed account of the defining features of vagueness, that an accurate theory of vagueness must involve the idea that truth comes in degrees. The core idea of degrees of truth is that while some sentences are true and some are false, others possess intermediate truth values: they are truer than the false sentences, but not as true as the true ones. Degree-theoretic treatments of vagueness have been proposed in the past, but all have encountered significant objections. In light of these, Smith develops a new type of degree theory. Its innovations include a definition of logical consequence that allows the derivation of a classical consequence relation from the degree-theoretic semantics, a unified account of degrees of truth and subjective probabilities, and the incorporation of semantic indeterminacy - the view that vague statements need not have unique meanings - into the degree-theoretic framework. As well as being essential reading for those working on vagueness, Smith's book provides an excellent entry-point for newcomers to the era - both from elsewhere in philosophy, and from computer science, logic and engineering. It contains a thorough introduction to existing theories of vagueness and to the requisite logical background.
Vagueness And Law
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Author : Geert Keil
language : en
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Release Date : 2016
Vagueness And Law written by Geert Keil and has been published by Oxford University Press this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2016 with Law categories.
Vague expressions are omnipresent in natural language. As such, their use in legal texts is virtually inevitable. If a law contains vague terms, the question whether it applies to a particular case often lacks a clear answer. One of the fundamental pillars of the rule of law is legal certainty. The determinacy of the law enables people to use it as a guide and places judges in the position to decide impartially. Vagueness poses a threat to these ideals. In borderline cases, the law seems to be indeterminate and thus incapable of serving its core rule of law value. In the philosophy of language, vagueness has become one of the hottest topics of the last two decades. Linguists and philosophers have investigated what distinguishes "soritical" vagueness from other kinds of linguistic indeterminacy, such as ambiguity, generality, open texture, and family resemblance concepts. There is a vast literature that discusses the logical, semantic, pragmatic, and epistemic aspects of these phenomena. Legal theory has hitherto paid little attention to the differences between the various kinds of linguistic indeterminacy that are grouped under the heading of "vagueness," let alone to the various theories that try to account for these phenomena. Bringing together leading scholars working on the topic of vagueness in philosophy and in law, this book fosters a dialogue between philosophers and legal scholars by examining how philosophers conceive vagueness in law from their theoretical perspective and how legal theorists make use of philosophical theories of vagueness. The chapters of the book are organized into three parts. The first part addresses the import of different theories of vagueness for the law, referring to a wide range of theories from supervaluationist to contextualist and semantic realist accounts in order to address the question of whether the law can learn from engaging with philosophical discussions of vagueness. The second part of the book examines different vagueness phenomena. The contributions in part 2 suggest that the greater awareness to different vagueness phenomena can make lawyers aware of specific issues and solutions so far overlooked. The third part deals with the pragmatic aspects of vagueness in law, providing answers to the question of how to deal with vagueness in law and with the professional, political, moral, and ethical issues such vagueness gives rise to.
Vague Objects And Vague Identity
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Author : Ken Akiba
language : en
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Release Date : 2014-03-18
Vague Objects And Vague Identity written by Ken Akiba and has been published by Springer Science & Business Media this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2014-03-18 with Philosophy categories.
This unique anthology of new, contributed essays offers a range of perspectives on various aspects of ontic vagueness. It seeks to answer core questions pertaining to onticism, the view that vagueness exists in the world itself. The questions to be addressed include whether vague objects must have vague identity, and whether ontic vagueness has a distinctive logic, one that is not shared by semantic or epistemic vagueness. The essays in this volume explain the motivations behind onticism, such as the plausibility of mereological vagueness and indeterminacy in quantum mechanics and they offer various arguments both for and against ontic vagueness; onticism is also compared with other, competing theories of vagueness such as semanticism, the view that vagueness exists only in our linguistic representation of the world. Gareth Evans’s influential paper of 1978, “Can There Be Vague Objects?” gave a simple but cogent argument against the coherence of ontic vagueness. Onticism was subsequently dismissed by many. However, in recent years, researchers have become aware of the logical gaps in Evans’s argument and this has triggered a new wave of interest in onticism. Onticism is now widely regarded as at least a coherent view. Reflecting this growing consensus, the present anthology for the first time puts together essays that are focused on onticism and its various facets and it fills in the lacuna in the literature on vagueness, a much-discussed subject in contemporary philosophy.
Unruly Words
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Author : Diana Raffman
language : en
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Release Date : 2013-12-04
Unruly Words written by Diana Raffman and has been published by Oxford University Press this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2013-12-04 with Philosophy categories.
Vague words, like "tall," "rich," and "old," lack clear boundaries of application: no clear line divides the tall people from the above average, or the old people from the middle-aged. Because they lack clear boundaries, these ordinary words cause logical and semantic problems in various disciplines including philosophy, decision theory, and the law. Philosophers and linguists have proposed several theories of vagueness to handle these difficulties, but none has been widely accepted. Raffman contends that virtually all previous treatments of vagueness have made two crucial mistakes: they have supposed that a semantic (non-epistemic) theory must abandon bivalence, and they have paid insufficient attention to the character of ordinary speech using vague words. She develops a new theory of vagueness-the multiple range theory-that corrects both of these errors. The new theory begins with the observation that ordinary speakers seem to apply vague words in multiple arbitrarily different but equally competent ways, even when all contextual factors are held fixed. Raffman interprets this feature of their use as evidence of multiple ranges of application in the semantics of vague words, where a range of application is a range of properties whose instances satisfy the word in question; for example, a range of application of "tall" is a range of heights, a range of "old" a range of ages, and so forth. The fundamental idea is that a vague word has multiple ranges of application, and applies to things relative to those ranges, even given a single fixed context. The fact that the ranges of a vague word are arbitrarily different-there is no reason to favor any particular one-is key to solving the notorious sorites paradox. The multiple range theory preserves bivalence and is more intuitive than other approaches. It is also simpler; for instance, it has no need of a definiteness operator, and it rules out the possibility of higher-order borderline cases, both of which introduce severe complications into other accounts. Some of the evidence Raffman draws upon in constructing her theory comes from a new psychological study of the way ordinary speakers actually use vague words.
Vagueness
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Author : Timothy Williamson
language : en
Publisher: Routledge
Release Date : 2002-01-04
Vagueness written by Timothy Williamson and has been published by Routledge this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2002-01-04 with Philosophy categories.
If you keep removing single grains of sand from a heap, when is it no longer a heap? From discussions of the heap paradox in classical Greece, to modern formal approaches like fuzzy logic, Timothy Williamson traces the history of the problem of vagueness. He argues that standard logic and formal semantics apply even to vague languages and defends the controversial, realist view that vagueness is a form of ignorance - there really is a grain of sand whose removal turns a heap into a non-heap, but we can never know exactly which one it is.
Aspects Of Vagueness
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Author : Heinz J. Skala
language : en
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Release Date : 2012-12-06
Aspects Of Vagueness written by Heinz J. Skala and has been published by Springer Science & Business Media this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2012-12-06 with Social Science categories.
The Second World Conference on Mathematics at the Service of Man was held at the Universidad Politecnica de Las Palmas, Canary Islands, Spain, June 28 to July 3, 1982. The first volume of the Proceedings of the Conference, entitled "Functional Equations-Theory and Applications" has appeared in the Reidel series "Mathematics and Its Applications". The papers in this volume consist of the invited lectures delivered at the Conference, Section 7: Non-Classical Logics and Modelling, as well as some selected papers which offer an introduction to the philosophy, methodology and to the lite rature of the broad and fascinating field of vagueness, imprecision and uncertainty. The contributed papers appeared in the volume of photo-offset preprints distributed at the Conference. It is our hope that the papers present a good sample with respect to the background, the formalism and practice of this area of research as far as we understand it today. As the subject "Vagueness" touches many aspects of human thinking, the contributions have been made from a broad spectrum ranging from philo~ophy through pure mathematics to probability theory and mathematical economics, therefore the careful reader should find some new insights here. In conclusion, the editors want to thank all authors who have contributed to this volume; the publishers of "Commenta tiones Mathematicae Universitatis Carolinae" for permission to reprint the paper "Fuzziness and Fuzzy Equality", Commentationes Mathematicae Universitatis Carolinae 23 (1982), 249-267, and D. Reidel for friendly cooperation.
Vagueness In Psychiatry
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Author : Geert Keil
language : en
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Release Date : 2017
Vagueness In Psychiatry written by Geert Keil and has been published by Oxford University Press this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2017 with Medical categories.
In psychiatry there is no sharp boundary between the normal and the pathological. Although clear cases abound, it is often indeterminate whether a particular condition does or does not qualify as a mental disorder. For example, definitions of subthreshold disorders and of the prodromal stages of diseases are notoriously contentious. Philosophers and linguists call concepts that lack sharp boundaries, and thus admit of borderline cases, 'vague'. Although blurred boundaries between the normal and the pathological are a recurrent theme in many publications concerned with the classification of mental disorders, systematic approaches that take into account philosophical reflections on vagueness are rare. This book provides interdisciplinary discussions about vagueness in psychiatry by bringing together scholars from psychiatry, psychology, philosophy, history, and law. It draws together various lines of inquiry into the nature of gradations between mental health and disease and discusses the individual and societal consequences of dealing with blurred boundaries in medical practice, forensic psychiatry, and beyond. --