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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 ...
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.
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 ...
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.
Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that examines the nature, origin, and limits of knowledge.Also called theory of knowledge, it explores different types of knowledge, such as propositional knowledge about facts, practical knowledge in the form of skills, and knowledge by acquaintance as a familiarity through experience.
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
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]
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 ...