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  1. Truth Meets Vagueness. Unifying the Semantic and the Soritical Paradoxes.Riccardo Bruni & Lorenzo Rossi - 2023 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 52 (6):1637-1671.
    Semantic and soritical paradoxes display remarkable family resemblances. For one thing, several non-classical logics have been independently applied to both kinds of paradoxes. For another, revenge paradoxes and higher-order vagueness—among the most serious problems targeting solutions to semantic and soritical paradoxes—exhibit a rather similar dynamics. Some authors have taken these facts to suggest that truth and vagueness require a unified logical framework, or perhaps that the truth predicate is itself vague. However, a common core of semantic and soritical paradoxes has (...)
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  • Reference Fixing and the Paradoxes.Mario Gomez-Torrente - 2024 - 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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  • 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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  • Thoughts about Thoughts: The Structure of Fregean Propositions.Nathan Bice - 2019 - Dissertation, Columbia University
    This dissertation is about the structure of thought. Following Gottlob Frege, I define a thought as the sort of content relevant to determining whether an assertion is true or false. The historical component of the dissertation involves interpreting Frege’s actual views on the structure of thought. I argue that Frege did not think that a thought has a unique decomposition into its component senses, but rather the same thought can be decomposed into senses in a variety of distinct ways. I (...)
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  • 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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  • Vagueness and Zombies: Why ‘Phenomenally Conscious’ has No Borderline Cases.Jonathan A. Simon - 2017 - Philosophical Studies 174 (8):2105-2123.
    I argue that there can be no such thing as a borderline case of the predicate ‘phenomenally conscious’: for any given creature at any given time, it cannot be vague whether that creature is phenomenally conscious at that time. I first defend the Positive Characterization Thesis, which says that for any borderline case of any predicate there is a positive characterization of that case that can show any sufficiently competent speaker what makes it a borderline case. I then appeal to (...)
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  • Tolerance effect in categorisation with vague predicates.Minyao Huang - 2013 - Pragmatics and Cognition 21 (2):340-358.
    Vagueness is understood as the problem of associating imprecise application criteria with ordinary predicates such as ‘bald’ or ‘blue’. It is often construed as due to one’s tolerance to a minute difference in forming a verdict on the application of a vague predicate. This paper reports an experiment conducted to test the effect of tolerance, using as paradigm categorisation tasks performed with respect to transitional series, e.g., a series of tomatoes from red to orange. The findings suggest a negative effect (...)
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  • Vagueness in Context.Stewart Shapiro - 2006 - Oxford, England: Oxford University Press UK.
    Stewart Shapiro's aim in Vagueness in Context is to develop both a philosophical and a formal, model-theoretic account of the meaning, function, and logic of vague terms in an idealized version of a natural language like English. It is a commonplace that the extensions of vague terms vary with such contextual factors as the comparison class and paradigm cases. A person can be tall with respect to male accountants and not tall with respect to professional basketball players. The main feature (...)
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  • Vagueza.Ricardo Santos - 2015 - Compêndio Em Linha de Problemas de Filosofia Analítica.
    Most words in natural language are vague, that is to say, they lack sharp boundaries and, hence, they have (actual or potential) borderline cases, where the word in question neither definitely applies nor definitely fails to apply. Vagueness gives rise to paradoxes, the best known of which is the sorites (concerned with how many grains of sand are needed to make a heap). Besides offering a solution to such paradoxes, a theory of vagueness should systematically describe how the truth conditions (...)
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  • Castles Built on Clouds: Vague Identity and Vague Objects.Benjamin L. Curtis & Harold W. Noonan - 2014 - In Ken Akiba & Ali Abasnezhad (eds.), Vague Objects and Vague Identity: New Essays on Ontic Vagueness. Dordrecht, Netherland: Springer. pp. 305-326.
    Can identity itself be vague? Can there be vague objects? Does a positive answer to either question entail a positive answer to the other? In this paper we answer these questions as follows: No, No, and Yes. First, we discuss Evans’s famous 1978 argument and argue that the main lesson that it imparts is that identity itself cannot be vague. We defend the argument from objections and endorse this conclusion. We acknowledge, however, that the argument does not by itself establish (...)
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  • Borderline Cases and Definiteness.Zoltán Vecsey - 2012 - Prolegomena 11 (2):197-206.
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  • (1 other version)The impossibility of vagueness.Kit Fine - 2008 - Philosophical Perspectives 22 (1):111-136.
    I wish to present a proof that vagueness is impossible. Of course, vagueness is possible; and so there must be something wrong with the proof. But it is far from clear where the error lies and, indeed, all of the assumptions upon which the proof depends are ones that have commonly been accepted. This suggests that we may have to radically alter our current conception of vagueness if we are to make proper sense of what it is.
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  • Epistemicism, paradox, and conditional obligation.Ivan Hu - 2015 - Philosophical Studies 172 (8):2123-2139.
    Stewart Shapiro has objected to the epistemicist theory of vagueness on grounds that it gives counterintuitive predictions about cases involving conditional obligation. This paper details a response on the epistemicist’s behalf. I first argue that Shapiro’s own presentation of the objection is unsuccessful as an argument against epistemicism. I then reconstruct and offer two alternative arguments inspired by Shapiro’s considerations, and argue that these fail too, given the information-sensitive nature of conditional obligations.
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  • Contextual logic with modalities for time and space.Haim Gaifman - 2008 - Review of Symbolic Logic 1 (4):433-458.
    Contextuality is trivially pervasive: all human experience takes place in endlessly changing environments and inexorably moving time frames. In order to have any meaning, the changing items must be placed within a more stable setting, a framework that is not subject to the same kind of contextual change. Total contextuality collapses into chaos, or becomes ineffable. While basic learning is highly contextual (one learns by example), what is learned transcends the examples used in the learning. Perhaps, in a similar manner, (...)
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  • (1 other version)Vagueness and Context.Stewart Shapiro & Eric Snyder - 2016 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 59 (4):343-381.
    A number of recent accounts for vague terms postulate a kind of context-sensitivity, one that kicks in after the usual ‘external’ contextual factors like comparison class are established and held fixed. In a recent paper, ‘Vagueness without Context Change’: 275–92), Rosanna Keefe criticizes all such accounts. The arguments are variations on considerations that have been brought against context-sensitive accounts of knowledge, predicates of personal taste, epistemic modals, and the like. The issues are well known and there are variety of options (...)
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  • Reasoning with Slippery Predicates.Stewart Shapiro - 2008 - Studia Logica 90 (3):313-336.
    It is a commonplace that the extensions of most, perhaps all, vague predicates vary with such features as comparison class and paradigm and contrasting cases. My view proposes another, more pervasive contextual parameter. Vague predicates exhibit what I call open texture: in some circumstances, competent speakers can go either way in the borderline region. The shifting extension and anti-extensions of vague predicates are tracked by what David Lewis calls the “conversational score”, and are regulated by what Kit Fine calls penumbral (...)
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  • (1 other version)The possibility of vagueness.Kit Fine - 2017 - Synthese 194 (10):3699-3725.
    I present a new approach to the logic and semantics of vagueness.
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  • Vagueness, Open-Texture, and Retrievability.Stewart Shapiro - 2013 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 56 (2-3):307-326.
    Just about every theorist holds that vague terms are context-sensitive to some extent. What counts as ?tall?, ?rich?, and ?bald? depends on the ambient comparison class, paradigm cases, and/or the like. To take a stock example, a given person might be tall with respect to European entrepreneurs and downright short with respect to professional basketball players. It is also generally agreed that vagueness remains even after comparison class, paradigm cases, etc. are fixed, and so this context sensitivity does not solve (...)
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  • Vagueness: A Conceptual Spaces Approach.Igor Douven, Lieven Decock, Richard Dietz & Paul Égré - 2013 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 42 (1):137-160.
    The conceptual spaces approach has recently emerged as a novel account of concepts. Its guiding idea is that concepts can be represented geometrically, by means of metrical spaces. While it is generally recognized that many of our concepts are vague, the question of how to model vagueness in the conceptual spaces approach has not been addressed so far, even though the answer is far from straightforward. The present paper aims to fill this lacuna.
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  • The Sorites is nonsense disguised by a fallacy.L. Goldstein - 2012 - Analysis 72 (1):61-65.
    It is uncontroversial that, on any run through a Sorites series, a subject, at some point, switches from an ‘F’ verdict on one exhibit to a non-‘F’ verdict on the next. (Where this ‘cut-off’ point occurs tend to differ from trial to trial.) It is a fallacy to infer that there must be a cut-off point simpliciter between F items and non-F items. The transition is from firm ground to swamp. In the Sorites reasoning, some conditionals of the form ‘If (...)
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  • Vagueness: Why Do We Believe in Tolerance?Paul Égré - 2015 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 44 (6):663-679.
    The tolerance principle, the idea that vague predicates are insensitive to sufficiently small changes, remains the main bone of contention between theories of vagueness. In this paper I examine three sources behind our ordinary belief in the tolerance principle, to establish whether any of them might give us a good reason to revise classical logic. First, I compare our understanding of tolerance in the case of precise predicates and in the case of vague predicates. While tolerance in the case of (...)
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  • Ultralarge lotteries: Analyzing the Lottery Paradox using non-standard analysis.Sylvia Wenmackers - 2013 - Journal of Applied Logic 11 (4):452-467.
    A popular way to relate probabilistic information to binary rational beliefs is the Lockean Thesis, which is usually formalized in terms of thresholds. This approach seems far from satisfactory: the value of the thresholds is not well-specified and the Lottery Paradox shows that the model violates the Conjunction Principle. We argue that the Lottery Paradox is a symptom of a more fundamental and general problem, shared by all threshold-models that attempt to put an exact border on something that is intrinsically (...)
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  • Strict Finitism, Feasibility, and the Sorites.Walter Dean - 2018 - Review of Symbolic Logic 11 (2):295-346.
    This article bears on four topics: observational predicates and phenomenal properties, vagueness, strict finitism as a philosophy of mathematics, and the analysis of feasible computability. It is argued that reactions to strict finitism point towards a semantics for vague predicates in the form of nonstandard models of weak arithmetical theories of the sort originally introduced to characterize the notion of feasibility as understood in computational complexity theory. The approach described eschews the use of nonclassical logic and related devices like degrees (...)
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  • Vagueness: A Guide.Giuseppina Ronzitti (ed.) - 2011 - Dordrecht, Netherland: Springer Verlag.
    This volume analyzes and studies how vagueness occurs and matters as a specific problem in the context of theories that are primarily about something else.
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  • Infinity and continuum in the alternative set theory.Kateřina Trlifajová - 2021 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 12 (1):1-23.
    Alternative set theory was created by the Czech mathematician Petr Vopěnka in 1979 as an alternative to Cantor’s set theory. Vopěnka criticised Cantor’s approach for its loss of correspondence with the real world. Alternative set theory can be partially axiomatised and regarded as a nonstandard theory of natural numbers. However, its intention is much wider. It attempts to retain a correspondence between mathematical notions and phenomena of the natural world. Through infinity, Vopěnka grasps the phenomena of vagueness. Infinite sets are (...)
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  • Vagueness and domain restriction.Peter Pagin - unknown
    This paper develops an idea of saving ordinary uses of vague predicates from the Sorites by means of domain restriction. A tolerance level for a predicate, along a dimension, is a difference with respect to which the predicate is semantically insensitive. A central gap for the predicate+dimension in a domain is a segment of an associated scale, larger than this difference, where no object in the domain has a measure, and such that the extension of the predicate has measures on (...)
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  • Handbook of Logical Thought in India.Sundar Sarukkai & Mihir Chakraborty (eds.) - 2018 - New Delhi, India: Springer.
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  • Deconstructing a Topological Sorites.D. Rizza - 2013 - Philosophia Mathematica 21 (3):361-364.
    In this paper I examine some difficulties with the argument presented as a topological sorites in Z. Weber and M. Colyvan, ‘A topological sorites’, Journal of Philosophy 107, 311–325. In particular, I suggest that the argument may be used to support the claim that sorites-type paradoxes cannot arise in a cohesive environment.
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