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Full Idea
I take vagueness to be a semantic feature, a deficiency of meaning. It is to be distinguished from generality, undecidability, and ambiguity.
Gist of Idea
Vagueness is semantic, a deficiency of meaning
Source
Kit Fine (Vagueness, Truth and Logic [1975], Intro)
Book Ref
'Vagueness: a Reader', ed/tr. Keefe,R /Smith,P [MIT 1999], p.120
A Reaction
Sounds good. If we cut nature at the joints with our language, then nature is going to be too subtle and vast for our finite and gerrymandered language, and so it will break down in tricky situations. But maybe epistemology precedes semantics?
| 9766 | Study vagueness first by its logic, then by its truth-conditions, and then its metaphysics [Fine,K] |
| 9768 | Vagueness is semantic, a deficiency of meaning [Fine,K] |
| 9767 | A vague sentence is only true for all ways of making it completely precise [Fine,K] |
| 9770 | Logical connectives cease to be truth-functional if vagueness is treated with three values [Fine,K] |
| 9769 | Vagueness can be in predicates, names or quantifiers [Fine,K] |
| 9772 | Meaning is both actual (determining instances) and potential (possibility of greater precision) [Fine,K] |
| 9771 | Logic holding between indefinite sentences is the core of all language [Fine,K] |
| 9773 | With the super-truth approach, the classical connectives continue to work [Fine,K] |
| 9774 | Borderline cases must be under our control, as capable of greater precision [Fine,K] |
| 9775 | Excluded Middle, and classical logic, may fail for vague predicates [Fine,K] |
| 9776 | A thing might be vaguely vague, giving us higher-order vagueness [Fine,K] |