Vagueness


In philosophy, vagueness is an important problem in semantics, metaphysics and philosophical logic. Definitions of this problem vary. A predicate is vague if it has borderline cases. The predicate "is tall" is vague because there seems to be no particular height at which someone becomes tall. Alternately, a predicate is sometimes said to be vague if there are borderline cases of its application, such that in these cases competent speakers of the language may faultlessly disagree over whether the predicate applies. The disagreement over whether a hotdog is a sandwich suggests that “sandwich” is vague.
Vagueness is commonly demonstrated by the Sorites paradox. A standard form of this paradox features a 2000-man sequence of progressively taller men, starting with a paradigm case of a short man at one extreme and at the other extreme, a paradigm case of a tall one.
Sorites paradoxes exploit the intuition that some vague predicates are tolerant with respect to small enough differences on a dimension decisive of their application. This principle may seem to hold on the basis that no particular height is more justified than others in its vicinity as a cut-off for shortness.
This intuition has been called the No Sharp Boundaries thesis about vague predicates and plays a prominent role in theories of vagueness.
The Sorites paradox dates to the fourth century BCE and is attributed to Eubulides of Melitus. It has received a resurgence of attention since 1975, when three papers published in Synthese effectively conceived the contemporary study of vagueness.
The problem posed by vagueness is to explain its particular kind of indeterminacy. Does vagueness render large portions of ordinary language meaningless? Likely not, since we frequently use vague language to great effect in ordinary discourse. If not, what is vagueness, at the level of predicate logic? How is it to be modeled without contradiction, and without sacrificing too much of classical logic? Is vagueness semantic, metaphysical or epistemic?
Vagueness has in its own right reaped the attention of an extensive literature. In addition, vagueness is a topic that touches many other questions in philosophy, linguistics and cognitive science, not to mention ordinary conversation.

Importance

The concept of vagueness has philosophical importance. Suppose one wants to come up with a definition of "right" in the moral sense. One wants a definition to cover actions that are clearly right and exclude actions that are clearly wrong, but what does one do with the borderline cases? Surely, there are such cases. Some philosophers say that one should try to come up with a definition that is itself unclear on just those cases. Others say that one has an interest in making his or her definitions more precise than ordinary language, or his or her ordinary concepts, themselves allow; they recommend one advances precising definitions.

In law

Vagueness is also a problem which arises in law, and in some cases judges have to arbitrate regarding whether a borderline case does, or does not, satisfy a given vague concept. Examples include disability, human life, adulthood, race, etc. Even such apparently unambiguous concepts such as gender can be subject to vagueness problems, not just from transsexuals' gender transitions but also from certain genetic conditions which can give an individual mixed male and female biological traits.

In science

Many scientific concepts are of necessity vague, for instance species in biology cannot be precisely defined, owing to unclear cases such as ring species. Nonetheless, the concept of species can be clearly applied in the vast majority of cases. As this example illustrates, to say that a definition is "vague" is not necessarily a criticism. Consider those animals in Alaska that are the result of breeding huskies and wolves: are they dogs? It is not clear: they are borderline cases of dogs. This means one's ordinary concept of doghood is not clear enough to let us rule conclusively in this case.

Approaches

The philosophical question of what the best theoretical treatment of vagueness is—which is closely related to the problem of the paradox of the heap, a.k.a. sorites paradox—has been the subject of much philosophical debate.

Fuzzy logic

One theoretical approach is that of fuzzy logic, developed by American mathematician Lotfi Zadeh. Fuzzy logic proposes a gradual transition between "perfect falsity", for example, the statement "Bill Clinton is bald", to "perfect truth", for, say, "Patrick Stewart is bald". In ordinary logics, there are only two truth-values: "true" and "false". The fuzzy perspective differs by introducing an infinite number of truth-values along a spectrum between perfect truth and perfect falsity. Perfect truth may be represented by "1", and perfect falsity by "0". Borderline cases are thought of as having a "truth-value" anywhere between 0 and 1. Advocates of the fuzzy logic approach have included K. F. Machina and Dorothy Edgington.

Supervaluationism

Another theoretical approach is known as "supervaluationism". This approach has been defended by Kit Fine and Rosanna Keefe. Fine argues that borderline applications of vague predicates are neither true nor false, but rather are instances of "truth value gaps". He defends an interesting and sophisticated system of vague semantics, based on the notion that a vague predicate might be "made precise" in many alternative ways. This system has the consequence that borderline cases of vague terms yield statements that are neither true, nor false.
Given a supervaluationist semantics, one can define the predicate 'supertrue' as meaning "true on all precisifications". This predicate will not change the semantics of atomic statements, but does have consequences for logically complex statements. In particular, the tautologies of sentential logic, such as 'Frank is bald or Frank is not bald', will turn out to be supertrue, since on any precisification of baldness, either 'Frank is bald' or 'Frank is not bald' will be true. Since the presence of borderline cases seems to threaten principles like this one, the fact that supervaluationism can "rescue" them is seen as a virtue.

Subvaluationism

Subvaluationism is the logical dual of supervaluationism, and has been defended by Dominic Hyde and Pablo Cobreros. Whereas the supervaluationist characterises truth as 'supertruth', the subvaluationist characterises truth as 'subtruth', or "true on at least some precisifications".
Subvaluationism proposes that borderline applications of vague terms are both true and false. It thus has 'truth-value gluts'. According to this theory, a vague statement is true if it is true on at least one precisification and false if it is false under at least one precisification. If a vague statement comes out true under one precisification and false under another, it is both true and false. Subvaluationism ultimately amounts to the claim that vagueness is a truly contradictory phenomenon. Of a borderline case of 'bald man' it would be both true and false to say that he is bald, and both true and false to say that he is not bald.

The epistemicist view

A fourth approach, known as the "epistemicist view", has been defended by Timothy Williamson, R. A. Sorensen and, and Nicholas Rescher. They maintain that vague predicates do, in fact, draw sharp boundaries, but that one cannot know where these boundaries lie. One's confusion about whether some vague word does or does not apply in a borderline case is explained as being due to one's ignorance. For example, on the epistemicist view, there is a fact of the matter, for every person, about whether that person is old or not old. It is just that one may sometimes be ignorant of this fact.

As a property of objects

One possibility is that one's words and concepts are perfectly precise, but that objects themselves are vague. Consider Peter Unger's example of a cloud : it is not clear where the boundary of a cloud lies; for any given bit of water vapor, one can ask whether it is part of the cloud or not, and for many such bits, one won't know how to answer. So perhaps one's term 'cloud' denotes a vague object precisely. This strategy has been poorly received, in part due to Gareth Evans's short paper "Can There Be Vague Objects?". Evans's argument appears to show that there can be no vague identities, but as Lewis makes clear, Evans takes for granted that there are in fact vague identities, and that any proof to the contrary cannot be right. Since the proof Evans produces relies on the assumption that terms precisely denote vague objects, the implication is that the assumption is false, and so the vague-objects view is wrong.
Still by, for instance, proposing alternative deduction rules involving Leibniz's law or other rules for validity some philosophers are willing to defend ontological vagueness as some kind of metaphysical phenomenon. One has, for example, Peter van Inwagen, Trenton Merricks and Terence Parsons.

Legal principle

In the common law system, vagueness is a possible legal defence against by-laws and other regulations. The legal principle is that delegated power cannot be used more broadly than the delegator intended. Therefore, a regulation may not be so vague as to regulate areas beyond what the law allows. Any such regulation would be "void for vagueness" and unenforceable. This principle is sometimes used to strike down municipal by-laws that forbid "explicit" or "objectionable" contents from being sold in a certain city; courts often find such expressions to be too vague, giving municipal inspectors discretion beyond what the law allows. In the US this is known as the vagueness doctrine and in Europe as the principle of legal certainty.