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Vagueness is commonly diagnosed by a predicate's ability to give rise to the Sorites paradox. Vagueness is separate from ambiguity, in which an expression has multiple denotations. For instance the word "bank" is ambiguous since it can refer either to a river bank or to a financial institution, but there are no borderline cases between both ...
As well as a Preface, an Introduction and an Index, the book consists of 12 chapters, or papers, as the authors call them in their introduction. [1] Chapters 1 (Vagueness in Logic), 8 (Logic in an Age of Science) and 9 (A Confused "Semiotic") were written by Bentley; Chapter 10 (Common Sense and Science) by Dewey, while the remainder were signed jointly.
Williamson has contributed to analytic philosophy of language, logic, metaphysics and epistemology.. On vagueness, he holds a position known as epistemicism, which states that every seemingly vague predicate (like "bald" or "thin") actually has a sharp cutoff, which is impossible for us to know.
Knowledge and Its Limits, a 2000 book by philosopher Timothy Williamson, [1] argues that the concept of knowledge cannot be analyzed into a set of other concepts; instead, it is sui generis. Thus, though knowledge requires justification, truth, and belief, the word "knowledge" cannot be accurately regarded as simply shorthand for " justified ...
Vagueness is a form of uncertainty where the analyst is unable to clearly differentiate between two different classes, such as 'person of average height' and 'tall person'. This form of vagueness can be modelled by some variation on Zadeh 's fuzzy logic or subjective logic .
Definitions of knowledge try to describe the essential features of knowledge. This includes clarifying the distinction between knowing something and not knowing it, for example, pointing out what is the difference between knowing that smoking causes cancer and not knowing this.
Graff Fara is best known for her work on the problem of vagueness, where she defends an interest-relative theory of "contextualism".In her most influential article, "Shifting Sands: An Interest-Relative Theory of Vagueness", she argues that the meanings of vague expressions render the truth conditions of utterances of sentences containing them sensitive to our interests.
In the 18th century, the Marquis de Condorcet was a political scientist who correctly perceived obscurantism as a contributing cause of the French Revolution in 1789.. In restricting education and knowledge to a ruling class, obscurantism is anti-democratic in its components of anti-intellectualism and social elitism, which exclude the majority of the people, deemed unworthy of knowing the ...