Vagueness is at the heart of so much of everyday conversation, that I feel it's a shame how little attention it gets. Often people talk past one another because they don't see the vagueness, and when a conversation is heated it's very easy to obstinately apply crisp logic where it doesn't belong.
It seems like vague predicates are mostly really just fuzzy predicates, ones that admit of degrees of applicability between 0 and 1. So someone is wholly bald if they have no hair at all, and partially bald if they're missing some normally-present hair. That doesn't seem to solve the paradox of the heap though, because it's not clear what "wholly a heap" or "partially a heap" would mean; we would need to have some clear threshold for what constitutes the "1" end of the spectrum still, even if we allow for values between 0 and 1.
I think your second concern is particularly salient. I am interested in fuzzy logic and the like, but I do think you run into problems with the edge cases (i.e. our example about twilight). Where exactly does the "1" stop on Mt Everest? On a heap? The problem is not that we need some intermediate category, since we will still have vagueness at the edges of that category. All we have done is created another level of vagueness
I want to do a longer one digging more into the issues of vagueness, so stay tuned, but that could be a whole series. I try to balance between longer and shorter videos to give folks easy references and more in-depth research.
The meaning of terms is determined in the domain of discourse. The exact number of grains of sand on a beach is not important for what we usually mean when we say beach. If a pail of sand was removed from a beach, it would not lose any of its beachness. If the sand was still there, but we built a strip mall on it, it would lose its beachness. Often words have less to do with their physical properties than their intended usage.
I think polysemy and homonymy would likely be classified as versions of ambiguity, not vagueness necessarily, unless there are absolute borderline cases.
Vagueness is at the heart of so much of everyday conversation, that I feel it's a shame how little attention it gets. Often people talk past one another because they don't see the vagueness, and when a conversation is heated it's very easy to obstinately apply crisp logic where it doesn't belong.
Great content. Keep it up
Thanks!
It seems like vague predicates are mostly really just fuzzy predicates, ones that admit of degrees of applicability between 0 and 1. So someone is wholly bald if they have no hair at all, and partially bald if they're missing some normally-present hair. That doesn't seem to solve the paradox of the heap though, because it's not clear what "wholly a heap" or "partially a heap" would mean; we would need to have some clear threshold for what constitutes the "1" end of the spectrum still, even if we allow for values between 0 and 1.
I think your second concern is particularly salient. I am interested in fuzzy logic and the like, but I do think you run into problems with the edge cases (i.e. our example about twilight). Where exactly does the "1" stop on Mt Everest? On a heap? The problem is not that we need some intermediate category, since we will still have vagueness at the edges of that category. All we have done is created another level of vagueness
I wish this video had been longer.
I want to do a longer one digging more into the issues of vagueness, so stay tuned, but that could be a whole series. I try to balance between longer and shorter videos to give folks easy references and more in-depth research.
put it on loop and become a near-expert
Can vagueness be understood as a relationship of parts to a whole?
The meaning of terms is determined in the domain of discourse. The exact number of grains of sand on a beach is not important for what we usually mean when we say beach. If a pail of sand was removed from a beach, it would not lose any of its beachness. If the sand was still there, but we built a strip mall on it, it would lose its beachness. Often words have less to do with their physical properties than their intended usage.
I don't know about the rest but the day you accidentally spell Nietzsche correctly is the day you're a True Philosopher... whatever "day" means.
Is vagueness synonymous with polysemy, then? Or is that reserved for situations that are definitively multi-entendre?
I think polysemy and homonymy would likely be classified as versions of ambiguity, not vagueness necessarily, unless there are absolute borderline cases.
At first, I was a bit ambitious about this video, but generally, I found it somewhat vague…