Download or read book Theories of Vagueness written by Rosanna Keefe and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2000-09-28 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A powerful comparative study of the main theories of vagueness, first published in 2000.
Download or read book Vagueness as Arbitrariness written by Sagid Salles and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Vagueness written by Timothy Williamson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-01-04 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Unruly Words written by Diana Raffman and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2014-02 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Unruly Words, Diana Raffman advances a new theory of vagueness which, unlike previous accounts, is genuinely semantic while preserving bivalence. According to this new approach, called the multiple range theory, vagueness consists essentially in a term's being applicable in multiple arbitrarily different, but equally competent, ways, even when contextual factors are fixed.
Download or read book Vagueness and Degrees of Truth written by Nicholas J. J. Smith and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2008-11-06 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Vagueness and Law written by Geert Keil and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Vagueness in Psychiatry written by Geert Keil and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Blurred boundaries between the normal and the pathological are a recurrent theme in almost every publication concerned with the classification of mental disorders. Yet, systematic approaches that take into account discussions about vagueness are rare. This volume is the first in the psychiatry/philosophy literature to tackle this problem.
Download or read book Cuts and Clouds written by Richard Dietz and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-02-11 with total page 599 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vagueness is a deeply puzzling aspect of the relation between language and the world. Is it a feature of the way we represent reality in language, or a feature of reality itself? How can we reason with vague concepts? Cuts and Clouds presents the latest work towards an understanding of these puzzles about the nature and logic of vagueness.
Download or read book Vagueness as Arbitrariness written by Sagid Salles and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-03-12 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Vagueness Logic and Ontology written by Mr Dominic Hyde and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2012-10-01 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Resorting to natural law is one way of conveying the philosophical conviction that moral norms are not merely conventional rules. Accordingly, the notion of natural law has a clear metaphysical dimension, since it involves the recognition that human beings do not conceive themselves as sheer products of society and history. And yet, if natural law is to be considered the fundamental law of practical reason, it must show also some intrinsic relationship to history and positive law. The essays in this book examine this tension between the metaphysical and the practical and how the philosophical elaboration of natural law presents this notion as a "limiting-concept", between metaphysics and ethics, between the mutable and the immutable; between is and ought, and, in connection with the latter, even the tension between politics and eschatology as a double horizon of ethics. This book, contributed to by scholars from Europe and America, is a major contribution to the renewed interest in natural law. It provides the reader with a comprehensive overview of natural law, both from a historical and a systematic point of view. It ranges from the mediaeval synthesis of Aquinas through the early modern elaborations of natural law, up to current discussions on the very possibility and practical relevance of natural law theory for the contemporary mind.
Download or read book Vagueness A Guide written by Giuseppina Ronzitti and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2011-03-03 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Vagueness and Thought written by Andrew Bacon and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Vagueness is the study of concepts that admit borderline cases. The epistemology of vagueness concerns attitudes we should have towards propositions we know to be borderline. On this basis Andrew Bacon develops a new theory of vagueness in which vagueness is fundamentally a property of propositions, explicated in terms of its role in thought."--
Download or read book Vagueness written by Rosanna Keefe and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vagueness is currently the subject of vigorous debate in the philosophy of logic and language. Vague terms-such as "tall", "red", "bald", and "tadpole" -- have borderline cases (arguably, someone may be neither tall nor not tall); and they lack well-defined extensions (there is no sharp boundary between tall people and the rest). The phenomenon of vagueness poses a fundamental challenge to classical logic and semantics, which assumes that propositions are either true or false and that extensions are determinate. Another striking problem to which vagueness gives rise is the sorites paradox. If you remove one grain from a heap of sand, surely you must be left with a heap. Yet apply this principle repeatedly as you remove grains one by one, and you end up, absurdly, with a solitary grain that counts as a heap. This anthology collects papers in the field. After an introduction that surveys the field, the essays form four groups, starting with some historically notable pieces. The 1970s saw an explosion of interest in vagueness, and the second group of essays reprints classic papers from this period. The following group of papers represent current work on the logic and semantics of vagueness. The essays in the final group are contributions to the continuing debate about vague objects and vague identity.
Download or read book The Cambridge Handbook of the Philosophy of Language written by Piotr Stalmaszczyk and published by . This book was released on 2021-12-02 with total page 831 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive guide to contemporary investigations into the relationship between language, philosophy, and linguistics.
Download or read book Semantics Lexical Structures and Adjectives written by Claudia Maienborn and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-02-19 with total page 577 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discover vital research on the lexical and cognitive meanings of words. In this exciting book from a team of world-class researchers, in-depth articles explain a wide range of topics, including thematic roles, sense relation, ambiguity and comparison. The authors focus on the cognitive and conceptual structure of words and their meaning extensions such as coercion, metaphors and metonymies. The book features highly cited material – available in paperback for the first time since its publication – and is an essential starting point for anyone interested in lexical semantics, especially where it meets other cognitive and conceptual research.
Download or read book The Nature and Value of Vagueness in the Law written by Hrafn Asgeirsson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-04-10 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lawmaking is – paradigmatically – a type of speech act: people make law by saying things. It is natural to think, therefore, that the content of the law is determined by what lawmakers communicate. However, what they communicate is sometimes vague and, even when it is clear, the content itself is sometimes vague. This monograph examines the nature and consequences of these two linguistic sources of indeterminacy in the law. The aim is to give plausible answers to three related questions: In virtue of what is the law vague? What might be good about vague law? How should courts resolve cases of vagueness? It argues that vagueness in the law is sometimes a good thing, although its value should not be overestimated. It also proposes a strategy for resolving borderline cases, arguing that textualism and intentionalism – two leading theories of legal interpretation – often complement rather than compete with each other.
Download or read book Vagueness Gradability and Typicality written by Galit Weidman Sassoon and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2013-03-15 with total page 446 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brill's Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages offers an accessible yet engaging coverage of medieval European history and culture, c. 500-c. 1500, in a series of themed articles, taking an interdisciplinary and comparative approach.
