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Vagueness [electronic resource]

Front Cover
2 Reviews
Routledge, 1994 - Philosophy - 325 pages
If you keep removing single grains of sand from a heap, when is it no longer a heap? From discussions of the heap paradox in classical Greece, to modern formal approaches like fuzzy logic, Timothy Williamson traces the history of the problem of vagueness. He argues that standard logic and formal semantics apply even to vague languages and defends the controversial, realist view that vagueness is a form of ignorance - there really is a grain of sand whose removal turns a heap into a non-heap, but we can never know exactly which one it is.
  

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Review: Vagueness

User Review  - Matt - Goodreads

Williamson's book is a landmark. It is admirably precise and synoptic. It is, in my view, a chore to read Williamson, but careful attention to each chapter of this book will be rewarding in the end. Read full review

Review: Vagueness

User Review  - Roy - Goodreads

Did you know that Vagueness has clear and distinct boundaries? Read full review

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Contents

The early history of sorites paradoxes
8
The ideal of precision
36
The rehabilitation of vagueness
70
Manyvalued logic and degrees of truth
96
Supervaluations
142
Nihilism
165
Vagueness as ignorance
185
Inexact knowledge
216
Vagueness in the world
248
Appendix The logic of clarity
270
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Vagueness (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
This makes the notion of a borderline case crucial in accounts of vagueness. I shall concentrate on an historical characterization of borderline cases that ...
plato.stanford.edu/ entries/ vagueness/

The dynamics of vagueness
lead to new insightsinto the nature of vagueness in general and the semanticsof .... vagueness is quite different from the one below in section 3.4. ...
www.semanticsarchive.net/ Archive/ Tk1OTYyO/ barker.vagueness.pdf

Philosophy 250 Vagueness Syllabus
Mark Sainsbury, “Tolerating Vagueness”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian ... Crispin Wright, “The Epistemic Conception of Vagueness”, The Southern Journal ...
frege.brown.edu/ heck/ philosophy/ pdf/ syllabi/ phil250_2001.pdf

Vagueness - Bibliography
Ballweg, Joachim [1983] Vagueness or context-dependence? Supervaluation revisited in a semantics based on scales, in Thomas T. Ballmer and Manfred Pinkal ...
www.btinternet.com/ ~justin.needle/ bib_alpha.htm

JSTOR: Wright on the Epistemic Conception of Vagueness
According to the epistemic conception of vagueness defended in Williamson 1994, what we use vague terms to say is true or false, but in borderline cases we ...
links.jstor.org/ sici?sici=0003-2638(199601)56%3A1%3C39%3AWOTECO%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Z

Seminar on Vagueness (Philosophy G9525, Spring 2007) Achille C ...
raised by the phenomenon of vagueness in the philosophy of language, logic, ... Topics include: semantic vagueness; vagueness in the world; vagueness and ...
www.columbia.edu/ ~av72/ Vagueness/ Syllabus.pdf

Mediamatic.net - Williamson
In Vagueness, Timothy Williamson shows the kind of significance problems created when we put words into it, ie, when we apply the rules of perfect languages ...
www.mediamatic.net/ article-5562-nl.html

Williamson on Vagueness and Context-Dependence
Several philosophers offer explanations of linguistic vagueness by ... necessary nor sufficient for vagueness. He supports this claim, in turn, by example. ...
www.blackwell-synergy.com/ doi/ abs/ 10.1111/ j.1933-1592.2004.tb00370.x

Vagueness: From epistemicism to transvaluationism
Interest in vagueness has increased dramatically in recent philosophy, ... these: Does vagueness apply to language and thought exclusively, or does it ...
www.springerlink.com/ index/ 2007471236851864.pdf

MIT opencourseware | Linguistics and Philosophy | 24.729 Topics in ...
In Vagueness: A Reader. (No need to feel guilty if you skip section 5.) Williamson, Timothy. ... "Shifting Sands: An Interest-Relative Theory of Vagueness. ...
ocw.mit.edu/ OcwWeb/ Linguistics-and-Philosophy/ 24-729Fall-2005/ Readings/ index.htm

About the author (1994)

Timothy Williamson is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh.

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