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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 ...
Vagueness and Degrees of Truth is a 2008 book by Nicholas J. Smith, in which the author examines vagueness based on the idea of "degrees of truth". It means that although some sentences are true and some are false, others possess intermediate truth values. In other words, some sentences are truer than the false sentences, but not as true as the ...
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 ...
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 ...
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.
In philosophy, the idea has proved particularly appealing in the case of vagueness. Degrees of truth is an important concept in law. The term is an older concept than conditional probability. Instead of determining the objective probability, only a subjective assessment is defined.
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
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 ...