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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.
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]
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 ...
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
Essays of Michel de Montaigne. An essay is, generally, a piece of writing that gives the author's own argument, but the definition is vague, overlapping with those of a letter, a paper, an article, a pamphlet, and a short story.
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 ambiguity is an example of scope ambiguity, a phenomenon widely studied in formal semantics. De re/de dicto ambiguity is another notable example of sentence-level ambiguity which has received much attention in linguistics and philosophy.