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Vagueness in Context (Paperback)
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Vagueness in Context (Paperback)
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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 (even short) with respect
to professional basketball players. The main feature of Shapiro's
account is that the extensions (and anti-extensions) of vague terms
also vary in the course of a conversation, even after the external
contextual features, such as the comparison class, are fixed. A
central thesis is that in some cases, a competent speaker of the
language can go either way in the borderline area of a vague
predicate without sinning against the meaning of the words and the
non-linguistic facts. Shapiro calls this open texture, borrowing
the term from Friedrich Waismann.
The formal model theory has a similar structure to the
supervaluationist approach, employing the notion of a sharpening of
a base interpretation. In line with the philosophical account,
however, the notion of super-truth does not play a central role in
the development of validity. The ultimate goal of the technical
aspects of the work is to delimit a plausible notion of logical
consequence, and to explore what happens with the sorites
paradox.
Later chapters deal with what passes for higher-order vagueness -
vagueness in the notions of "determinacy" and "borderline" -- and
with vague singular terms, or objects. In each case, the
philosophical picture is developed by extending andmodifying the
original account. This is followed with modifications to the model
theory and the central meta-theorems.
As Shapiro sees it, vagueness is a linguistic phenomenon, due to
the kinds of languages that humans speak. But vagueness is also due
to the world we find ourselves in, as we try to communicate
features of it to each other. Vagueness is also due to the kinds of
beings we are. There is no need to blame the phenomenon on any one
of those aspects.
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