Vague Intensions: A Modest Marriage Proposal
On one hand, vague predicates seem to be useful; on the other, they appear to be fully tolerant (and thereby useless). Utility demands cutoffs; tolerance forbids them. This tension has fueled much work on vagueness. This chapter gives a very modest proposal on how to escape this apparent tension. The proposal is not profound, but it may be liberating. Genuinely vague predicates are without cutoffs, but they are useful in providing us the ingredients for sharp look-alikes of the vague. If this is right, the existence of cutoffs is neither a worry nor surprising.
Keywords: intensions, nihilism, paracomplete, paraconsistent, vagueness, Sorites
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .