Description
Book SynopsisVague words, like tall, rich, and old, lack clear boundaries of application: no clear line divides the tall people from the above average, or the old people from the middle-aged. Because they lack clear boundaries, these ordinary words cause logical and semantic problems in various disciplines including philosophy, decision theory, and the law. Philosophers and linguists have proposed several theories of vagueness to handle these difficulties, but none has been widely accepted.Raffman contends that virtually all previous treatments of vagueness have made two crucial mistakes: they have supposed that a semantic (non-epistemic) theory must abandon bivalence, and they have paid insufficient attention to the character of ordinary speech using vague words. She develops a new theory of vagueness-the multiple range theory-that corrects both of these errors. The new theory begins with the observation that ordinary speakers seem to apply vague words in multiple arbitrarily different but equally
Trade ReviewUnruly Words is a pleasure to read, and it provides plenty of material for thought and discussion. I strongly recommend it for anyone involved or interested in the philosophical debate on vagueness. * Jonas Akerman, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews *
Table of ContentsPreface ; 1. Introduction and Fundamentals ; 1.1. Whirlwind Tour of Competing Theories of Vagueness ; 1.2. Initial Observations (1): Blurred Boundaries, Sharp Boundaries, and Stopping Places ; 1.3. Initial Observations (2): Vagueness and Gradability ; 1.4. Initial Observations (3): Vagueness and Soriticality ; 1.5. Initial Observations (4): Vagueness and Context-Sensitivity ; 1.6. Vagueness and Rule-following ; 1.7. Two Policies and a Caveat ; 1.8. Selective Review ; 1.9. Looking Ahead ; 2. The In's and Out's of Borderline Cases ; 2.1. Lay of the Land ; 2.2. The Standard Analysis ; 2.3. The Incompatibilist Analysis ; 2.4. Objections and Replies ; 2.5. Symmetry, Indeterminacy, Higher-Order Borderlines, Accessibility; and Some Advantages of the Incompatibilist Analysis ; 2.6. Independently Fishy Features of Higher-Order Borderlines ; 2.7. Selective Review ; 2.8. Looking ahead. ; 3. Framework for a Semantics of Vagueness ; 3.1. Vagueness and Indexicality ; 3.2. Two Ingredients of Sense for Vague Words ; 3.3. A Refinement: Contexts of Utterance vs Intended Contexts ; 3.4. Selective Review ; 3.5. Looking Ahead ; 4. The Multiple Range Theory of Vagueness ; 4.1. Vagueness and Reference ; 4.2. Why Ranges of Application Are Not Precisifications ; 4.3. Progress Report and Two Criteria of Vagueness ; 4.4. Evaluation ; 4.5. Solving the Sorites ; 4.6. Verdicts on Some Specific Predicates ; 4.7. Vagueness, Soriticality, Borderlines, V-index-sensitivity, Gradability, ; and Indeterminacy: Relatives or Just Friends? ; 4.8. Selective Review ; 4.9. Looking Ahead ; Figures ; 5. The Competent Use of Vague Words ; 5.1. A Pragmatic Sorites ; 5.2. Testing for Hysteresis ; 5.3. Non-perceptual Hysteresis: Does Our Hypothesis Generalize? ; 5.4. Meaning and Use: Implementing the Multi-Range Semantics ; 5.5. An Etymological Speculation ; 5.6. The Truth About Tolerance ; 5.7. Looking Back: Rules, Reasons, and the Governing View ; Figures ; Appendix ; Notes ; Bibliography ; Index
