Context is a prominent theme in accounts of the semantics of vagueness. Contextual theories of vagueness have been motivated in part by a desire to disarm skeptical arguments that make use of vagueness; another motive is the hope that they might help to resolve the Sorites Paradox. This paper is intended as part of a larger project, which aims at describing and comparing the leading theories th...

Spatial-OLAP (SOLAP) technologies are dedicated to multidimensional analysis of large volumes of (spatial) data. Spatial data are subject to different types of uncertainty, in particular spatial vagueness. Although several researches propose new models to cope with spatial vagueness, their integration in SOLAP systems is still in an embryonic state. Also, analyzing multidimensional data with me...

Almost every theory of vagueness shares at least one feature: it uses, and in most cases heavily relies on, some kind of normative predicate (or predicates) in its metalanguage. Metalinguistic normative predicates are discussed chiefly by supervaluationists and other defenders of higher-order vagueness. According to this group of theorists, the existence of higher-order vagueness depends on and...

Problems of conceptual uncertainty have been dealt with in theories of formal logic. Such theories try to accommodate vagueness in two main ways. One is fuzzy logic that introduces degrees of truth. The other way of accommodating formal logic to vagueness is super valuations and its descendants. This paper studies a more inclusive class of reasoning support than formal logic. In the present app...

Many XML retrieval applications require relevance-oriented ranking of retrieved elements in order to capture the vagueness inherent to the information retrieval process. This relevance-oriented ranking should not only support vagueness at the content level, but also at the structural level. In this paper, we use a probabilistic object-relational framework to model representation and retrieval s...

Sorensen (1985) has argued that ‘vague’ is itself a vague predicate; it is just as sorites-prone as its positive instances. This result has been exploited by Hyde (1994) in an ingenious attempt to establish that vague predicates must necessarily suffer from higher-order vagueness. More precisely, Hyde has argued that the vagueness of ‘vague’ ensures that the “paradigmatic conception”, according...