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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 ...
Definitions of knowledge aim to identify the essential features of knowledge. Closely related terms are conception of knowledge, theory of knowledge, and analysis of knowledge. Some general features of knowledge are widely accepted among philosophers, for example, that it involves cognitive success and epistemic contact with reality.
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 .
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 ...
In epistemology, Williamson suggests that the concept of knowledge is unanalysable. This went against the common trend in philosophical literature up to that point, which was to argue that knowledge could be analysed into constituent concepts. (Typically this would be justified true belief plus an extra factor.)
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]
For engineers, "Fuzziness is imprecision or vagueness of definition." [ 4 ] For scientists, a fuzzy concept is an idea which is "to an extent applicable" in a situation. It means that the concept can have gradations of significance or unsharp (variable) boundaries of application; a fuzzy statement is a statement which is true "to some extent ...
This arises from the vagueness of user queries, of concepts represented by content providers, of matching query terms to provider terms and of trying to combine different knowledge bases with overlapping but subtly different concepts. Fuzzy logic is the most common technique for dealing with vagueness.