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  1. A generic Solution to the Sorites Paradox.Susanne Bobzien - 2024 - Erkenntnis 2024 (Online):1-40.
    ABSTRACT: This paper offers a generic revenge-proof solution to the Sorites paradox that is compatible with several philosophical approaches to vagueness, including epistemicism, supervaluationism, psychological contextualism and intuitionism. The solution is traditional in that it rejects the Sorites conditional and proposes a modally expressed weakened conditional instead. The modalities are defined by the first-order logic QS4M+FIN. (This logic is a modal companion to the intermediate logic QH+KF, which places the solution between intuitionistic and classical logic.) Borderlineness is introduced modally as (...)
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  2. Fuzzy and more. Implementing a logic calculator for comparing philosophical theories of vagueness using Structured Query Language. Part 1.Marian Călborean - manuscript
    I aim to develop a tool for comparing theories of vagueness, using Structured Query Language. Relevant SQL snippets will be used throughout.
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  3. Vagueness and Frege.Marian Călborean - 2021 - Romanian Journal of Analytic Philosophy 2:12-44.
    A constant of Frege’s writing is his rejection of indeterminate predicates as found in natural language. This paper follows Frege’s remarks on vagueness from the early "Begriffsschrift” to his mature works, drawing brief parallels with the main contemporary theories of vagueness. I critically examine Frege’s arguments for the inconsistency of natural language and argue that the inability to accommodate vagueness in his mature ontology is mainly due to heuristic rules of thumb which Frege took as essential, not to a deep (...)
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  4. Reference Fixing and the Paradoxes.Mario Gomez-Torrente - forthcoming - In Mattia Petrolo & Giorgio Venturi (eds.), Paradoxes between Truth and Proof. Springer.
    I defend the hypothesis that the semantic paradoxes, the paradoxes about collections, and the sorites paradoxes, are all paradoxes of reference fixing: they show that certain conventionally adopted and otherwise functional reference-fixing principles cannot provide consistent assignments of reference to certain relevant expressions in paradoxical cases. I note that the hypothesis has interesting implications concerning the idea of a unified account of the semantic, collection and sorites paradoxes, as well as about the explanation of their “recalcitrance”. I also note that (...)
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  5. The Sorites, Content Fixing, and the Roots of Paradox.Mario Gomez-Torrente - forthcoming - In Otavio Bueno & Ali Abasnezhad (eds.), On the Sorites Paradox. Springer.
    The presentation of the “dual picture of vagueness” in my earlier work is supplemented here with a number of additional considerations. I emphasize how the picture lends itself naturally to treatments of the contribution of a typical degree adjective to propositional content and to truth conditions. A number of reasonable refinements of the picture are presented, especially concerning occasions of use of a degree adjective in which a class containing a sorites series is somehow involved in content fixing, but in (...)
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  6. Vagueness: A Global Approach by Kit Fine. [REVIEW]Chad Carmichael - 2022 - Review of Metaphysics 75 (3):594-595.
    A review of Kit Fine's book, Vagueness: A Global Approach.
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  7. Interview with Paul Égré.Lina M. Lissia - 2021 - The Reasoner 15 (1):1-3.
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  8. The Early Husserl on Typicality.Hamid Taieb - 2021 - In Arnaud Dewalque, Charlotte Gauvry & Sébastien Richard (eds.), Philosophy of Language in the Brentano School: Reassessing the Brentanian Legacy. Palgrave-Macmillan. pp. 263–278..
    This paper presents and evaluates the early Husserl’s account of typicality. In the Logical Investigations, Husserl holds that the meaning of ordinary language (common) names is sensitive to typicality: this meaning depends on typical examples which vary in different contexts and are more or less similar to one another. This seems to entail that meanings, which according to Husserl are concepts, are “fluctuating” (schwankend) and vague. Prima facie, such a claim contravenes his theory of ideal meanings, or concepts, which are (...)
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  9. O Problema da Vagueza.Sagid Salles - 2016 - Fundamento: Revista de Pesquisa Em Filosofia 1 (12):139-174.
    Este artigo é uma introdução crítica ao problema da vagueza. Não vou explicar ou avaliar as teorias da vagueza aqui. Meu objetivo é introduzir e discutir o próprio problema, com o intuito de alcançar uma formulação clara do mesmo. Minha formulação tornará claro quais condições uma teoria ideal da vagueza deveria satisfazer, assim como os principais obstáculos para desenvolver teorias que satisfaçam estas condições.
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  10. Fundamental Nomic Vagueness.Eddy Keming Chen - 2022 - Philosophical Review 131 (1):1-49.
    If there are fundamental laws of nature, can they fail to be exact? In this paper, I consider the possibility that some fundamental laws are vague. I call this phenomenon 'fundamental nomic vagueness.' I characterize fundamental nomic vagueness as the existence of borderline lawful worlds and the presence of several other accompanying features. Under certain assumptions, such vagueness prevents the fundamental physical theory from being completely expressible in the mathematical language. Moreover, I suggest that such vagueness can be regarded as (...)
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  11. (2 other versions)Being Metaphysically Unsettled: Barnes and Williams on Metaphysical Indeterminacy and Vagueness.Matti Eklund - 2008 - Oxford Studies in Metaphysics 6:6.
    This chapter discusses the defence of metaphysical indeterminacy by Elizabeth Barnes and Robert Williams and discusses a classical and bivalent theory of such indeterminacy. Even if metaphysical indeterminacy arguably is intelligible, Barnes and Williams argue in favour of it being so and this faces important problems. As for classical logic and bivalence, the chapter problematizes what exactly is at issue in this debate. Can reality not be adequately described using different languages, some classical and some not? Moreover, it is argued (...)
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  12. Tolerance and the distributed sorites.Zach Barnett - 2019 - Synthese 196 (3):1071-1077.
    On some accounts of vagueness, predicates like “is a heap” are tolerant. That is, their correct application tolerates sufficiently small changes in the objects to which they are applied. Of course, such views face the sorites paradox, and various solutions have been proposed. One proposed solution involves banning repeated appeals to tolerance, while affirming tolerance in any individual case. In effect, this solution rejects the reasoning of the sorites argument. This paper discusses a thorny problem afflicting this approach to vagueness. (...)
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  13. Moral realism and semantic accounts of moral vagueness.Ali Abasnezhad - 2023 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 66 (3):381-393.
    Miriam Schoenfield argues that moral realism and moral vagueness imply ontic vagueness. In particular, she argues that neither shifty nor rigid semantic accounts of vagueness can provide a satisfactory explanation of moral vagueness for moral realists. This paper constitutes a response. I argue that Schoenfield's argument against the shifty semantic account presupposes that moral indeterminacies can, in fact, be resolved determinately by crunching through linguistic data. I provide different reasons for rejecting this assumption. Furthermore, I argue that Schoenfield's rejection of (...)
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  14. Vagueness as Indecision.J. Robert G. Williams - 2016 - Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 90 (1):285-309.
    This essay explores the thesis that for vague predicates, uncertainty over whether a borderline instance x of red/large/tall/good is to be understood as practical uncertainty over whether to treat x as red/large/tall/good. Expressivist and quasi-realist treatments of vague predicates due to John MacFarlane and Daniel Elstein provide the stalking-horse. It examines the notion of treating/counting a thing as F , and links a central question about our attitudes to vague predications to normative evaluation of plans to treat a thing as (...)
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  15. (1 other version)Philosophical & Jurisprudential Issues of Vagueness.Stephen Schiffer - forthcoming - In Geert Keil & Poscher (ed.), Vagueness and the Law: Philosophical and Legal Approaches. Not yet known.
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  16. Unruly Words: A Study of Vague Language. [REVIEW]Jonas Åkerman - 2014 - Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 201403.
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  17. Vagaries about Vagueness.Nathan Salmon - 2010 - In Richard Dietz & Sebastiano Moruzzi (eds.), Cuts and clouds: vagueness, its nature, and its logic. New York: Oxford University Press.
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  18. review of Vagueness.Adam Morton - 1995 - Philosophical Books 36 (4):272-276.
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  19. Metaphysical Vagueness and Metaphysical Indeterminacy.Matti Eklund - 2013 - Metaphysica 14 (2):165-179.
    The topic of this paper is whether there is metaphysical vagueness. It is shown that it is important to distinguish between the general phenomenon of indeterminacy and the more narrow phenomenon of vagueness (the phenomenon that paradigmatically rears its head in sorites reasoning). Relatedly, it is important to distinguish between metaphysical indeterminacy and metaphysical vagueness. One can wish to allow metaphysical indeterminacy but rule out metaphysical vagueness. As is discussed in the paper, central argument against metaphysical vagueness, like those of (...)
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  20. Vague Reference and Approximating Judgements.Thomas Bittner & Barry Smith - 2003 - Spatial Cognition and Computation 3 (2):137–156.
    We propose a new account of vagueness and approximation in terms of the theory of granular partitions. We distinguish different kinds of crisp and non-crisp granular partitions and we describe the relations between them, concentrating especially on spatial examples. We describe the practice whereby subjects use regular grid-like reference partitions as a means for tempering the vagueness of their judgments, and we demonstrate how the theory of reference partitions can yield a natural account of this practice, which is referred to (...)
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  21. Granular Partitions and Vagueness.Thomas Bittner & Barry Smith - 2001 - In Barry Smith & Christopher Welty (eds.), Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS). ACM Press. pp. 309-320.
    There are some who defend a view of vagueness according to which there are intrinsically vague objects or attributes in reality. Here, in contrast, we defend a view of vagueness as a semantic property of names and predicates. All entities are crisp, on this view, but there are, for each vague name, multiple portions of reality that are equally good candidates for being its referent, and, for each vague predicate, multiple classes of objects that are equally good candidates for being (...)
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  22. Aristoteles 2002.Barry Smith - 2003 - In Thomas Buchheim (ed.), Kann man heute noch etwas anfangen mit Aristoteles? Meiner. pp. 3-38.
    The essay surveys recent developments in ontology and defends a strategy for improvement of ontologies based on ontological realism. As a thought experiment, we consider central theses of Aristotelian metaphysics, and show how they fall short of what we believe to be the requirements of ontology today. Above all, Aristotle provides us with no strategy for the reconciliation of common-sense realism and scientific realism where these diverge. We focus specifically on shortfalls in Aristotle’s treatment of individual accidents, especially in regard (...)
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  23. (2 other versions)Being Metaphysically Unsettled: Barnes and WIlliams on Metaphysical Indeterminacy and Vagueness.Matti Eklund - 2008 - In Dean W. Zimmerman (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaphysics. Oxford University Press. pp. 6.
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  24. The Presidential Address: Where Demonstratives Meet Vagueness: Possible Languages.Adam Morton - 1999 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 99 (1):1 - 18.
    I present three invented languages, in order to support a claim that vagueness and demonstrativity are related. One of them handles vagueness like English handles demonstratives, the second handles demonstratives like English handles vagueness, and the third combines the resources of the first two. The argument depends on the claim that all three can be learned and used by anyone who can speak English.
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  25. The Logic of Vagueness and the Category of Synechism.Mihai Nadin - 1980 - The Monist 63 (3):351-363.
    In his article “Issues of Pragmaticism” published in 1905, in The Monist, Charles S. Peirce complains that “Logicians have been at fault in giving Vagueness the go-by, so far as not even to analyze it.” That same year, occupying himself with the consequences of “Critical commonsensism,” he affirmed, “I have worked out the logic of vagueness with something like completeness,” a statement that causes the majority of the commentators on his work, including the editors of the Collected Papers to ask (...)
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  26. A simple logic for comparisons and vagueness.Theodore J. Everett - 2000 - Synthese 123 (2):263-278.
    This article provides an intuitive semantic account of a new logic for comparisons (CL), in which atomic statements are assigned both a classical truth-value and a “how much” value or extension in the range [0, 1]. The truth-value of each comparison is determined by the extensions of its component sentences; the truth-value of each atomic depends on whether its extension matches a separate standard for its predicate; everything else is computed classically. CL is less radical than Casari’s comparative logics, in (...)
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  27. Vagueness And The Sorites Paradox.Kirk Ludwig & Greg Ray - 2002 - Noûs 36 (s16):419-461.
    A sorites argument is a symptom of the vagueness of the predicate with which it is constructed. A vague predicate admits of at least one dimension of variation (and typically more than one) in its intended range along which we are at a loss when to say the predicate ceases to apply, though we start out confident that it does. It is this feature of them that the sorites arguments exploit. Exactly how is part of the subject of this paper. (...)
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  28. Vagueness in Geography.Achille C. Varzi - 2001 - Philosophy and Geography 4 (1):49–65.
    Some have argued that the vagueness exhibited by geographic names and descriptions such as ‘Albuquerque’, ‘the Outback’, or ‘Mount Everest’ is ultimately ontological: these terms are vague because they refer to vague objects, objects with fuzzy boundaries. I take the opposite stand and hold the view that geographic vagueness is exclusively semantic, or conceptual at large. There is no such thing as a vague mountain. Rather, there are many things where we conceive a mountain to be, each with its precise (...)
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Contextual Theories of Vagueness
  1. Vagueness and Relative Truth.Andrea Iacona - forthcoming - Philosophical Quarterly.
    According to a view called 'nihilism', sentences containing vague expressions cannot strictly speaking be true or false, because they lack definite truth conditions. While most theorists of vagueness tend to regard nihilism as a hopeless view, a few isolated attempts have been made to defend it. This paper aims to develop such attempts in a new direction by showing how nihilism, once properly spelled out, can meet three crucial explanatory challenges that respectively concern truth, assertibility, and communication.
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  2. Endogenous ambiguity and rational miscommunication.Toru Suzuki - 2023 - Journal of Economic Theory 211 (July).
    This paper studies a sender-receiver game in which both players want the receiver to choose the state-optimal action. Before observing the state, the sender observes a “contextual signal,” a payoff-irrelevant signal that correlates with states and is imperfectly shared with the receiver. Once the sender observes the state, the sender sends a message to the receiver, incurring a small messaging cost. It is shown that there is no miscommunication in any efficient equilibrium if the messaging cost is uniform or contextual (...)
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  3. Vagueness and Discourse Dynamics.Sam Carter - 2022 - In Daniel Altshuler (ed.), Linguistics Meets Philosophy. New York, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press.
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  4. The Fuzzy Brain. Vagueness and Mapping Connectivity in the Human Cerebral Cortex.Philipp Haueis - 2012 - Frontiers in Neuroanatomy 37 (6).
    While the past century of neuroscientific research has brought considerable progress in defining the boundaries of the human cerebral cortex, there are cases in which the demarcation of one area from another remains fuzzy. Despite the existence of clearly demarcated areas, examples of gradual transitions between areas are known since early cytoarchitectonic studies. Since multi-modal anatomical approaches and functional connectivity studies brought renewed attention to the topic, a better understanding of the theoretical and methodological implications of fuzzy boundaries in brain (...)
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  5. Vagueness and the Logic of the World.Zack Garrett - 2020 - Dissertation, University of Nebraska, Lincoln
    In this dissertation, I argue that vagueness is a metaphysical phenomenon---that properties and objects can be vague---and propose a trivalent theory of vagueness meant to account for the vagueness in the world. In the first half, I argue against the theories that preserve classical logic. These theories include epistemicism, contextualism, and semantic nihilism. My objections to these theories are independent of considerations of the possibility that vagueness is a metaphysical phenomenon. However, I also argue that these theories are not capable (...)
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  6. Theories of vagueness and theories of law.Alex Silk - 2019 - Legal Theory 25 (2):132-152.
    It is common to think that what theory of linguistic vagueness is correct has implications for debates in philosophy of law. I disagree. I argue that the implications of particular theories of vagueness on substantive issues of legal theory and practice are less far-reaching than often thought. I focus on four putative implications discussed in the literature concerning (i) the value of vagueness in the law, (ii) the possibility and value of legal indeterminacy, (iii) the possibility of the rule of (...)
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  7. Une théorie unifiée de la vérité et de la référence.Barry Smith & Berit Brogaard - 2004 - In Jean-Maurice Monnoyer (ed.), La Structure Du Monde. Vrin, Paris. pp. 141-184.
    The truthmaker theory rests on the thesis that the link between a true judgment and that in the world to which it corresponds is not a one-to-one but rather a one-to-many relation. An analogous thesis in relation to the link between a singular term and that in the world to which it refers is already widely accepted. This is the thesis to the effect that singular reference is marked by vagueness of a sort that is best understood in supervaluationist terms. (...)
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  8. Vague Disagreements and the Sorites Paradox.Ted Everett - forthcoming - In Bueno Otavio & Abasnezhad Ali (eds.), Logic, Epistemology, and the Unity of Science 33: On the Sorites Paradox. Springer.
    When you and I seriously argue over whether a man of seventy is old enough to count as an "old man", it seems that we are appealing neither to our own separate standards of oldness nor to a common standard that is already fixed in the language. Instead, it seems that both of us implicitly invoke an ideal, shared standard that has yet to be agreed upon: the place where we ought to draw the line. As with other normative standards, (...)
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  9. Sex, Vagueness, and the Olympics.Helen L. Daly - 2015 - Hypatia 30 (4):708-724.
    Sex determines much about one's life, but what determines one's sex? The answer is complicated and incomplete: on close examination, ordinary notions of female and male are vague. In 2012, the International Olympic Committee further specified what they mean by woman in response to questions about who, exactly, is eligible to compete in women's Olympic events. I argue, first, that their stipulation is evidence that the use of vague terms is better described by semantic approaches to vagueness than by epistemic (...)
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  10. 4. Contradictorial Gradualism Vs. Discontinuism: Two Views On Fuzziness And The Transition Problem.Marcelo VÁsconez - 2006 - Logique Et Analyse 49 (195).
    The dissertation has two parts, each dealing with a problem, namely: 1) What is the most adequate account of fuzziness -the so-called phenomenon of vagueness?, and 2) what is the most plausible solution to the sorites, or heap paradox? I will try to show that fuzzy properties are those which are gradual, amenable to be possessed in a greater or smaller extent. Acknowledgement of degrees in the instantiation of a property allows for a gradual transition from one opposite to the (...)
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  11. Forced‐March Sorites Arguments and Linguistic Competence.Jonas Åkerman - 2013 - Dialectica 67 (4):403-426.
    Agent relativists about vagueness (henceforth ‘agent relativists’) hold that whether or not an object x falls in the extension of a vague predicate ‘P’ at a time t depends on the judgemental dispositions of a particular competent agent at t. My aim in this paper is to critically examine arguments that purport to support agent relativism by appealing to data from forced-march Sorites experiments. The most simple and direct versions of such forced-march Sorites arguments rest on the following (implicit) premise: (...)
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  12. It’s Chicken and Eggs again: Vagueness, Quasi-Species, and Evolution.Ludger Jansen - 2006 - Conceptus: Zeitschrift Fur Philosophie 36 (89):71-77.
    Wether the chicken or the egg came first, is not only a mind-boggling but a substantial question. Its answer depends on the biological background theory one assumes. I review recent work on the topic (by Teichmann, Sorensen, Waller and Raatzsch) and resolve some of the disputes between these authors by borrowing from Aristotle the distinction between chicken-producing eggs. I then introduce the concept of a quasi-species to make explicit the vagueness involved in species-terms and prove 13 different priority-claims within a (...)
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  13. Saying More (or Less) than One Thing.Andrea Iacona - 2010 - In Richard Dietz & Sebastiano Moruzzi (eds.), Cuts and clouds: vagueness, its nature, and its logic. New York: Oxford University Press.
    In a paper called 'Definiteness and Knowability', Tim Williamson addresses the question whether one must accept that vagueness is an epistemic phenomenon if one adopts classical logic and a disquotational principle for truth. Some have suggested that one must not, hence that classical logic and the disquotational principle may be preserved without endorsing epistemicism. Williamson’s paper, however, finds ‘no plausible way of substantiating that possibility’. Its moral is that ‘either classical logic fails, or the disquotational principle does, or vagueness is (...)
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  14. review of Vagueness.Adam Morton - 1995 - Philosophical Books 36 (4):272-276.
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  15. Contextualist Theories of Vagueness.Jonas Åkerman - 2012 - Philosophy Compass 7 (7):470-480.
    During the last couple of decades, several attempts have been made to come up with a theory that can handle the various semantic, logical and philosophical problems raised by the vagueness of natural languages. One of the most influential ideas that have come into fashion in recent years is the idea that vagueness should be analysed as a form of context sensitivity. Such contextualist theories of vagueness have gained some popularity, but many philosophers have remained sceptical of the prospects of (...)
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  16. Frege on Vagueness and Ordinary Language.Stephen Puryear - 2013 - Philosophical Quarterly 63 (250):120-140.
    Frege supposedly believes that vague predicates have no referent (Bedeutung). But given other things he evidently believes, such a position would seem to commit him to a suspect nihilism according to which assertoric sentences containing vague predicates are neither true nor false. I argue that we have good reason to resist ascribing to Frege the view that vague predicates have no Bedeutung and thus good reason to resist seeing him as committed to the suspect nihilism. In the process, I call (...)
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  17. Vagueness Intuitions and the Mobility of Cognitive Sortals.Bert Baumgaertner - 2012 - Minds and Machines 22 (3):213-234.
    One feature of vague predicates is that, as far as appearances go, they lack sharp application boundaries. I argue that we would not be able to locate boundaries even if vague predicates had sharp boundaries. I do so by developing an idealized cognitive model of a categorization faculty which has mobile and dynamic sortals (`classes', `concepts' or `categories') and formally prove that the degree of precision with which boundaries of such sortals can be located is inversely constrained by their flexibility. (...)
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  18. Vagueness, semantics and psychology.Jonas Åkerman - 2011 - Philosophical Quarterly 61 (242):1-5.
    According to extension-shifting theories of vagueness, the extensions of vague predicates have sharp boundaries, which shift as a function of certain psychological factors. Such theories have been claimed to provide an attractive explanation of the appeal of soritical reasoning. I challenge this claim: the demand for such an explanation need not constrain the semantics of vague predicates at all.
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  19. In defense of true higher-order vagueness: a discussion of Stewart Shapiro on higher-order vagueness.Susanne Bobzien - 2011 - Synthese 180 (3):317-335.
    ABSTRACT: Stewart Shapiro recently argued that there is no higher-order vagueness. More specifically, his thesis is: (ST) ‘So-called second-order vagueness in ‘F’ is nothing but first-order vagueness in the phrase ‘competent speaker of English’ or ‘competent user of “F”’. Shapiro bases (ST) on a description of the phenomenon of higher-order vagueness and two accounts of ‘borderline case’ and provides several arguments in its support. We present the phenomenon (as Shapiro describes it) and the accounts; then discuss Shapiro’s arguments, arguing that (...)
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  20. Review of Stewart Shapiro, Vagueness in Context. [REVIEW]Steven Gross - 2009 - Philosophical Review 118 (2):261-266.
    Stewart Shapiro’s book develops a contextualist approach to vagueness. It’s chock-full of ideas and arguments, laid out in wonderfully limpid prose. Anyone working on vagueness (or the other topics it touches on—see below) will want to read it. According to Shapiro, vague terms have borderline cases: there are objects to which the term neither determinately applies nor determinately does not apply. A term determinately applies in a context iff the term’s meaning and the non-linguistic facts determine that they do. The (...)
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  21. (2 other versions)Shifting sands: An interest relative theory of vagueness.Delia Graff Fara - 2000 - Philosophical Topics 28 (1):45--81.
    I propose that the meanings of vague expressions render the truth conditions of utterances of sentences containing them sensitive to our interests. For example, 'expensive' is analyzed as meaning 'costs a lot', which in turn is analyzed as meaning 'costs significantly greater than the norm'. Whether a difference is a significant difference depends on what our interests are. Appeal to the proposal is shown to provide an attractive resolution of the sorites paradox that is compatible with classical logic and semantics.
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  22. A unified theory of truth and reference.Barry Smith & Berit Brogaard - 2000 - Logique Et Analyse 43 (169-170):49–93.
    The truthmaker theory rests on the thesis that the link between a true judgment and that in the world to which it corresponds is not a one-to-one but rather a one-to-many relation. An analogous thesis in relation to the link between a singular term and that in the world to which it refers is already widely accepted. This is the thesis to the effect that singular reference is marked by vagueness of a sort that is best understood in supervaluationist terms. (...)
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