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  1. True, Truer, Truest.Brian Weatherson - 2005 - Philosophical Studies 123 (1):47-70.
    What the world needs now is another theory of vagueness. Not because the old theories are useless. Quite the contrary, the old theories provide many of the materials we need to construct the truest theory of vagueness ever seen. The theory shall be similar in motivation to supervaluationism, but more akin to many-valued theories in conceptualisation. What I take from the many-valued theories is the idea that some sentences can be truer than others. But I say very different things to (...)
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  • Contradictions at the borders.David Ripley - 2011 - In Rick Nouwen, Robert van Rooij, Uli Sauerland & Hans-Christian Schmitz (eds.), Vagueness in Communication. Springer. pp. 169--188.
    The purpose of this essay is to shed some light on a certain type of sentence, which I call a borderline contradiction. A borderline contradiction is a sentence of the form F a ∧ ¬F a, for some vague predicate F and some borderline case a of F , or a sentence equivalent to such a sentence. For example, if Jackie is a borderline case of ‘rich’, then ‘Jackie is rich and Jackie isn’t rich’ is a borderline contradiction. Many theories (...)
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  • Introduction to metamathematics.Stephen Cole Kleene - 1952 - Groningen: P. Noordhoff N.V..
    Stephen Cole Kleene was one of the greatest logicians of the twentieth century and this book is the influential textbook he wrote to teach the subject to the next generation. It was first published in 1952, some twenty years after the publication of Godel's paper on the incompleteness of arithmetic, which marked, if not the beginning of modern logic. The 1930s was a time of creativity and ferment in the subject, when the notion of computable moved from the realm of (...)
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  • Fuzzy Epistemicism.John MacFarlane - 2010 - In Richard Dietz & Sebastiano Moruzzi (eds.), Cuts and clouds: vagueness, its nature, and its logic. New York: Oxford University Press.
    It is taken for granted in much of the literature on vagueness that semantic and epistemic approaches to vagueness are fundamentally at odds. If we can analyze borderline cases and the sorites paradox in terms of degrees of truth, then we don’t need an epistemic explanation. Conversely, if an epistemic explanation suffices, then there is no reason to depart from the familiar simplicity of classical bivalent semantics. I question this assumption, showing that there is an intelligible motivation for adopting a (...)
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  • (2 other versions)Introduction to Metamathematics.Ann Singleterry Ferebee - 1968 - Journal of Symbolic Logic 33 (2):290-291.
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  • The law of non-contradiction : new philosophical essays.Graham Priest, Jc Beall & Bradley P. Armour-Garb (eds.) - 2004 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    The Law of Non-Contradiction - that no contradiction can be true - has been a seemingly unassailable dogma since the work of Aristotle, in Book G of the Metaphysics. It is an assumption challenged from a variety of angles in this collection of original papers. Twenty-three of the world's leading experts investigate the 'law', considering arguments for and against it and discussing methodological issues that arise whenever we question the legitimacy of logical principles. The result is a balanced inquiry into (...)
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  • Vagueness, truth and logic.Kit Fine - 1975 - Synthese 30 (3-4):265-300.
    This paper deals with the truth-Conditions and the logic for vague languages. The use of supervaluations and of classical logic is defended; and other approaches are criticized. The truth-Conditions are extended to a language that contains a definitely-Operator and that is subject to higher order vagueness.
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  • On the psychology of vague predicates.Nicolao Bonini, Daniel Osherson, Riccardo Viale & Timothy Williamson - 1999 - Mind and Language 14 (4):377–393.
    Most speakers experience unclarity about the application of predicates like tall and red to liminal cases. We formulate alternative psychological hypotheses about the nature of this unclarity, and report experiments that provide a partial test of them. A psychologized version of the ‘vagueness-as-ignorance’ theory is then advanced and defended.
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  • An argument for the many.Robert Williams - 2006 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 106 (1):411-419.
    If one believes that vagueness is an exclusively representational phenomenon, one faces the problem of the many. In the vicinity of Kilimanjaro, there are many many ‘mountain candidates’ all, apparently, with more-or-less equal claim to be mountains. David Lewis has defended a radical claim: that all the billions of mountain candidates are mountains. This paper argues that the supervaluationist about vagueness should adopt Lewis’ proposal, on pain of losing their best explanation of the seductiveness of the sorites.
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  • Theories of Vagueness.Rosanna Keefe - 2000 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
    Most expressions in natural language are vague. But what is the best semantic treatment of terms like 'heap', 'red' and 'child'? And what is the logic of arguments involving this kind of vague expression? These questions are receiving increasing philosophical attention, and in this book, first published in 2000, Rosanna Keefe explores the questions of what we should want from an account of vagueness and how we should assess rival theories. Her discussion ranges widely and comprehensively over the main theories (...)
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  • The Psychology of Vagueness: Borderline Cases and Contradictions.Sam Alxatib & Francis Jeffry Pelletier - 2011 - Mind and Language 26 (3):287-326.
    In an interesting experimental study, Bonini et al. (1999) present partial support for truth-gap theories of vagueness. We say this despite their claim to find theoretical and empirical reasons to dismiss gap theories and despite the fact that they favor an alternative, epistemic account, which they call ‘vagueness as ignorance’. We present yet more experimental evidence that supports gap theories, and argue for a semantic/pragmatic alternative that unifies the gappy supervaluationary approach together with its glutty relative, the subvaluationary approach.
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  • The things we mean.Stephen R. Schiffer - 2003 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    Stephen Schiffer presents a groundbreaking account of meaning and belief, and shows how it can illuminate a range of crucial problems regarding language, mind, knowledge, and ontology. He introduces the new doctrine of 'pleonastic propositions' to explain what the things we mean and believe are. He discusses the relation between semantic and psychological facts, on the one hand, and physical facts, on the other; vagueness and indeterminacy; moral truth; conditionals; and the role of propositional content in information acquisition and explanation. (...)
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  • (2 other versions)Vagueness.Timothy Williamson - 1994 - New York: Routledge.
    Vagueness provides the first comprehensive examination of a topic of increasing importance in metaphysics and the philosophy of logic and language. Timothy Williamson traces the history of this philosophical problem from discussions of the heap paradox in classical Greece to modern formal approaches such as fuzzy logic. He illustrates the problems with views which have taken the position that standard logic and formal semantics do not apply to vague language, and defends the controversial realistic view that vagueness is a kind (...)
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  • Truth, belief, and vagueness.Kenton F. Machina - 1976 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 5 (1):47-78.
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  • (2 other versions)What's So Bad About Contradictions?Graham Priest - 2004 - In Graham Priest, Jc Beall & Bradley P. Armour-Garb (eds.), The law of non-contradiction : new philosophical essays. New York: Oxford University Press.
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  • Vagueness by Degrees.Dorothy Edgington - 1996 - In Rosanna Keefe & Peter Smith (eds.), Vagueness: A Reader. MIT Press.
    Book synopsis: 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 ; and they lack well-defined extensions. 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 (...)
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  • (1 other version)Vagueness: A minimal theory.Patrick Greenough - 2003 - Mind 112 (446):235-281.
    Vagueness is given a philosophically neutral definition in terms of an epistemic notion of tolerance. Such a notion is intended to capture the thesis that vague terms draw no known boundary across their range of signification and contrasts sharply with the semantic notion of tolerance given by Wright (1975, 1976). This allows us to distinguish vagueness from superficially similar but distinct phenomena such as semantic incompleteness. Two proofs are given which show that vagueness qua epistemic tolerance and vagueness qua borderline (...)
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  • Robust vagueness and the forced-March sorites paradox.Terence Horgan - 1994 - Philosophical Perspectives 8:159-188.
    I distinguish two broad approaches to vagueness that I call "robust" and "wimpy". Wimpy construals explain vagueness as robust (i.e., does not manifest arbitrary precision); that standard approaches to vagueness, like supervaluationism or appeals to degrees of truth, wrongly treat vagueness as wimpy; that vagueness harbors an underlying logical incoherence; that vagueness in the world is therefore impossible; and that the kind of logical incoherence nascent in vague terms and concepts is benign rather than malignant. I describe some implications for (...)
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  • (1 other version)The Things We Mean.Stephen Schiffer - 2003 - Tijdschrift Voor Filosofie 66 (2):395-395.
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  • Vagueness and utility: The semantics of common nouns. [REVIEW]Rohit Parikh - 1994 - Linguistics and Philosophy 17 (6):521 - 535.
    A utility-based approach to the understanding of vague predicates (VPs) is proposed. It is argued that assignment of truth values to propositions containing VPs entails unjustifiable assumptions of consensus; two models of VP semantics are criticized on this basis: (1) the super-truth theory of Kit Fine (1975), which requires an unlikely consensus on base points; (2) the fuzzy logic of Lotfi Zadeh (1975), on fuzzy truth values of sentences. Pragmatism is held to provide a key: successful behavior justifies a person's (...)
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  • An argument for the many.J. Robert G. Williams - 2006 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (Paperback) 106 (3):409-417.
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  • (2 other versions)Précis of The Things We Mean.Stephen Schiffer - 2006 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 73 (1):208-210.
    In The Things We Mean I argue that there exist such things as the things we mean and believe, and that they are what I call pleonastic propositions. The first two chapters offer an initial motivation and articulation of the theory of pleonastic propositions, and of pleonastic entities generally. The remaining six chapters bring that theory to bear on issues in the theory of content: the existence and nature of meanings; knowledge of meaning; the meaning relation and compositional semantics; the (...)
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  • Critical Notices.Rosanna Keefe - 2003 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 67 (2):491-500.
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  • The philosophical problem of vagueness.Dorothy Edgington - 2001 - Legal Theory 7 (4):371-378.
    Think of the color spectrum, spread out before you. You can identify the different colors with ease. But if you are asked to indicate the point at which one color ends and the next begins, you are at a loss. "There is no such point", is a natural thought: one color just shades gradually into the next.
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  • Theories of Vagueness.Rosanna Keefe - 2003 - Philosophical Quarterly 53 (212):460-462.
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