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Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Topics in philosophy > Logic
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Vagueness in Context (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R3,594
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Vagueness in Context (Hardcover)
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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 and
modifying 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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