An expression is vague, if its meaning is not precise. For vagueness at the sentence-level this means that a vague sentence does not give rise to precise truth conditions. This is a problem for the standard theory of meaning within linguistics, because this theory presupposes that each sentence has a precise meaning with respect to each context of use. The philosophical discussion on ‘vagueness...

A new, possibilistic logic based information retrieval model is presented. Its main feature is an explicit representation of both the vagueness and the uncertainty typical for the textual information representation and processing. The weights of index terms in documents and queries are directly interpreted as quantifying this vagueness and uncertainty. The classical approaches to the term-weigh...

Vagueness is a common linguistic phenomenon manifested by predicates that lack clear applicability conditions and boundaries such as High, Expert or Bad. The usage of vague terminology in ontology entities can hamper the latter’s quality, primarily in terms of shareability and meaning explicitness. In this paper we present the Vagueness Ontology, a metaontology that enables the explicit identif...

Diana Santos § Abstract In the present paper, the concept of vagueness will be taken up in detail, in order to make it more precise and to pin down its relevance for translation. In addition to view (some) translation choices as contrastive vagueness, I will argue that grammar too has to be contrasted, introducing the concepts of grammatical vagueness and contrastive grammatical vagueness. The ...

We seek to show that some properties of vague scalar adjectives are consequences of rational communication. Theories of vagueness are usually directed at a cluster of traditional philosophical desiderata: how vagueness fits into a theory of truth (or metaphysics), the sorites, and related issues. These are important, and we will have more to say about some of them, but we also seek to refocus t...

A central theme emerging from recent research on party competition is that political actors sometimes remain deliberately opaque in their communication. This phenomenon has been investigated under labels such as position-blurring, ambiguity, issue clarity or ideological clarity. In this paper we propose a distinction between two concepts are conflated literature: ambiguity and vagueness. While ...

Abstract Referentially vague (or ‘ignorance’) indefinites are known to exhibit apparently conflicting behavior: in the singular, they referentially (Giannakidou and Quer 2013, Alonso-Ovalle Menéndez-Benito 2010, 2011, 2013), but plural appear depend on a discourse given set. The phenomenon is typically discussed context of Spanish algún/algunos (Gutiérrez-Rexach 2001, Martí 2008, 2009); this pa...

Vagueness is one of the most persistent and challenging topics in the intersection of philosophy and logic. At least five other noteworthy books on vagueness have been written by philosophers since 1991 [2, 6, 11, 12, 15]. A (necessarily incomplete) bibliography that has been compiled for the Arché project Vagueness: its Nature and Logic (2004-2006) of the University of St Andrews lists more th...