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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 ...
Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. This page in a nutshell: Try to use clear and well-defined words in all articles. This essay describes ways in which writing is often considered to be vague , and then discusses strategies to avoid such problems and fix affected articles.
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.
Epistemicism is a position about vagueness in the philosophy of language or metaphysics, according to which there are facts about the boundaries of a vague predicate which we cannot possibly discover. Given a vague predicate, such as 'is thin' or 'is bald', epistemicists hold that there is some sharp cutoff, dividing cases where a person, for ...
A paradox arising from basic intuitions regarding knowledge, belief, or related epistemic notions. For instance, the knower paradox and the Fitch paradox. epistemic vagueness The view that vagueness is a feature of human knowledge, rather than of the world or of language. [123] Contrast in rebus vagueness and semantic vagueness. epistemicism
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 ...
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It might also be argued that conceptual vagueness is an inevitability, given the limited capacity of the human nervous systems. We just do not have enough neurons to maintain separate concepts for "dog with 1,000,000 hairs", "dog with 1,000,001 hairs" and so on. But conceptual vagueness is not metaphysical indeterminacy. [citation needed]