Author: Roy Sorense
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Keywords: contradiction, vagueness
Number of Pages: 208
Published: 2002-02-07
List price: $111.00
ISBN-10: 0199241309
ISBN-13: 9780199241309
Roy Sorenson offers a unique exploration of an ancient problem: vagueness. Did Buddha become a fat man in one second? Is there a tallest short giraffe? According to Sorenson’s epistemicist approach, the answers are yes! Although vagueness abounds in the way the world is divided, Sorenson argues that the divisions are sharp; yet we often do not know where they are. Written in Sorenson’e usual inventive and amusing style, this book offers original insight on language and logic, the way world is, and our understanding of it.
Author: Roy Sorensen
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Keywords: contradiction, vagueness
Number of Pages: 208
Published: 2004-08-19
List price: $50.00
ISBN-10: 019927116X
ISBN-13: 9780199271160
Roy Sorenson offers a unique exploration of an ancient problem: vagueness. Did Buddha become a fat man in one second? Is there a tallest short giraffe? According to Sorenson’s epistemicist approach, the answers are yes! Although vagueness abounds in the way the world is divided, Sorenson argues that the divisions are sharp; yet we often do not know where they are. Written in Sorenson’e usual inventive and amusing style, this book offers original insight on language and logic, the way world is, and our understanding of it.
Author: Timothy A. O. Endicott
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Keywords: law, vagueness
Number of Pages: 232
Published: 2001-03-01
List price: $175.00
ISBN-10: 0198268408
ISBN-13: 9780198268406
Vagueness in law can lead to indeterminacies in legal rights and obligations. This book responds to the challenges that those indeterminacies pose to theories of law and adjudication.
Author: Stewart Shapiro
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Keywords: context, vagueness
Number of Pages: 240
Published: 2008-05-15
List price: $35.00
ISBN-10: 0199544786
ISBN-13: 9780199544783
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 term
Author: Kees van Deemter
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Keywords: vagueness, praise, exactly
Number of Pages: 368
Published: 2010-03-01
List price: $29.95
ISBN-10: 0199545901
ISBN-13: 9780199545902
Our daily lives are full of vagueness or fuzziness. When we describe someone as "tall," for example, it is as though there is a particular height beyond which a person can be considered "tall." In this stimulating book, Kees Van Deemter cuts across various disciplines--including artificial intelligence, logic, and computer science--to illuminate the nature and importance of vagueness. Van Deemter shows why vagueness is both unavoidable and useful, and he demonstrates how tempting--and how wrong--it often is to think in terms of black and white, instead of the richly graded spectrum of the worl
Author: Timothy Williamso
Publisher: Routledge
Keywords: philosophy, problems, vagueness
Number of Pages: 344
Published: 1996-05-07
List price: $41.95
ISBN-10: 0415139805
ISBN-13: 9780415139809
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 of ignorance--that there really is a grain of sand whose removal t
Author: Nicholas J. J. Smith
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Keywords: truth, degrees, vagueness
Number of Pages: 272
Published: 2009-01-15
List price: $80.00
ISBN-10: 0199233004
ISBN-13: 9780199233007
Nicholas Smith argues that an adequate account of vagueness must involve degrees of truth. The basic idea of degrees of truth is that while some sentences are true and some are false, others possess intermediate truth values: they are truer than the false sentences, but not as true as the true ones. This idea is immediately appealing in the context of vagueness--yet it has fallen on hard times in the philosophical literature, with existing degree-theoretic treatments of vagueness facing apparently insuperable objections. Smith seeks to turn the tide in favor of a degree-theoretic treatment of
