Vagueness - Paperback

by Timothy Williamson (Author)

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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Vagueness is the first comprehensive treatment of this increasingly important topic in metaphysics and the philosophy of logic and language. Students in these areas and researchers in artificial intelligence and linguistics will find its non-technical approach invaluable. For the technically-minded, an appendix shows how the treatment can be formalized within the framework of epistemic logic.