I motivate and briefly sketch a linguistic theory of vagueness, on which the notion of indeterminacy is understood in terms of the conventions of language: a sentence is indeterminate iff the conventions of language either forbid asserting it and forbid asserting its negation, under the circumstances, or permit asserting either. I then consider an objection that purports to show that if this theory (or, as far as I can see, any other theory of vagueness that deserved the label "linguistic" were (...) true, there would be no such thing as indeterminacy. I respond to this objection by arguing on independent grounds against its main premise, the widely-accepted claim that if it is indeterminate whether P, no human being knows whether P. I defend an alternative view according to which, when it is indeterminate whether P, it is often also indeterminate whether we know that P. (shrink)

In this paper I provide some formal schemas for the analysis of vague predicates in terms of a set of semantic relations other than classical synonymy, including weak synonymy (as between "large" and "huge"), antonymy (as between "large" and "small"), relativity (as between "large" and "large for a dog"), and a kind of supervenience (as between "large" and "wide" or "long"). All of these relations are representable in the simple comparative logic CL, in accordance with the basic formula: the more (...) something is F, the more (or less) it is G. I use Carnapian meaning postulates to define these relations as constraints on interpretations of the formal language of CL. (shrink)

I provide an intuitive, semantic account of a new logic forcomparisons (CL), in which atomic statements are assigned both aclassical truth-value and a ``how much'''' value or extension in the range [0, 1]. The truth-value of each comparison is determinedby the extensions of its component sentences; the truth-value ofeach atomic depends on whether its extension matches a separatestandard for its predicate; everything else is computed classically. CL is less radical than Casari''s comparative logics, in that it does not allow for (...) the formation of comparative statements out of truth-functional molecules. I argue that CL provides a betteranalysis of comparisons and predicate vagueness than classicallogic, fuzzy logic or supervaluation theory. CL provides a modelfor descriptions of the world in terms of comparisons only. Thesorites paradox can be solved by the elimination of atomic sentences. (shrink)

It is a truism that people speak ‘loosely’——that is, that they often say things that we can recognize not to be true, but which come close enough to the truth for practical purposes. Certain expressions. such as those including ‘exactly’, ‘all’ and ‘perfectly’, appear to serve as signals of the intended degree of approximation to the truth. This article presents a novel formalism for representing the notion of approximation to the truth, and analyzes the meanings of these expressions in terms (...) of this formalism. Pragmatic loosencss of this kind should be distinguished from authentic truth-conditional vagueness. (shrink)