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Author: Roy Sorensen
Publisher: Clarendon Press
ISBN: 0191588067
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 214
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Book Description
Did Buddha become a fat man in one second? Is there a tallest short giraffe? Epistemicists answer 'Yes!' They believe that any predicate that divides things divides them sharply. They solve the ancient sorites paradox by picturing vagueness as a kind of ignorance. The alternative solutions are radical. They either reject classical theorems or inference rules or reject our common sense view of what can exist. Epistemicists spare this central portion of our web of belief by challenging peripheral intuitions about the nature of language. So why is this continuation of the status quo so incredible? Why do epistemicists themselves have trouble believing their theory? In Vagueness and Contradiction Roy Sorensen traces our incredulity to linguistic norms that build upon our psychological tendencies to round off insignificant differences. These simplifying principles lead to massive inconsistency, rather like the rounding off errors of calculators with limited memory. English entitles speakers to believe each 'tolerance conditional' such as those of the form 'If n is small, then n + 1 is small.' The conjunction of these a priori beliefs entails absurd conditionals such as 'If 1 is small, then a billion is small.' Since the negation of this absurdity is an a priori truth, our a priori beliefs about small numbers are jointly inconsistent. One of the tolerance conditionals, at the threshold of smallness, must be an analytic falsehood that we are compelled to regard as a tautology. Since there are infinitely many analytic sorites arguments, Sorensen concludes that we are obliged to believe infinitely many contradictions. These contradictions are not specifically detectable. They are ineliminable, like the heat from a light bulb. Although the light bulb is not designed to produce heat, the heat is inevitably produced as a side-effect of illumination. Vagueness can be avoided by representational systems that make no concession to limits of perception, or memory, or testimony. But quick and rugged representational systems, such as natural languages, will trade 'rationality' for speed and flexibility. Roy Sorensen defends epistemicism in his own distinctive style, inventive and amusing. But he has some serious things to say about language and logic, about the way the world is and about our understanding of it.
Author: Roy Sorensen
Publisher: Clarendon Press
ISBN: 0191588067
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 214
Get Book Here
Book Description
Did Buddha become a fat man in one second? Is there a tallest short giraffe? Epistemicists answer 'Yes!' They believe that any predicate that divides things divides them sharply. They solve the ancient sorites paradox by picturing vagueness as a kind of ignorance. The alternative solutions are radical. They either reject classical theorems or inference rules or reject our common sense view of what can exist. Epistemicists spare this central portion of our web of belief by challenging peripheral intuitions about the nature of language. So why is this continuation of the status quo so incredible? Why do epistemicists themselves have trouble believing their theory? In Vagueness and Contradiction Roy Sorensen traces our incredulity to linguistic norms that build upon our psychological tendencies to round off insignificant differences. These simplifying principles lead to massive inconsistency, rather like the rounding off errors of calculators with limited memory. English entitles speakers to believe each 'tolerance conditional' such as those of the form 'If n is small, then n + 1 is small.' The conjunction of these a priori beliefs entails absurd conditionals such as 'If 1 is small, then a billion is small.' Since the negation of this absurdity is an a priori truth, our a priori beliefs about small numbers are jointly inconsistent. One of the tolerance conditionals, at the threshold of smallness, must be an analytic falsehood that we are compelled to regard as a tautology. Since there are infinitely many analytic sorites arguments, Sorensen concludes that we are obliged to believe infinitely many contradictions. These contradictions are not specifically detectable. They are ineliminable, like the heat from a light bulb. Although the light bulb is not designed to produce heat, the heat is inevitably produced as a side-effect of illumination. Vagueness can be avoided by representational systems that make no concession to limits of perception, or memory, or testimony. But quick and rugged representational systems, such as natural languages, will trade 'rationality' for speed and flexibility. Roy Sorensen defends epistemicism in his own distinctive style, inventive and amusing. But he has some serious things to say about language and logic, about the way the world is and about our understanding of it.
Author: Roy A. Sorensen
Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand
ISBN: 9780198249818
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 456
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Book Description
In 1942 G.E. Moore first wrote about the curious sort of "nonsense" exhibited by the statement "it is raining but I do not believe it". What Moore discovered was a species of blindspots: consistent propositions that cannot be rationally accepted by certain individuals even though they mightbe true. In this book, Professor Sorenson aims to provide a unified solution to a large family of philosophical puzzles and paradoxes through a study of blindspots. He devotes special attention to revealing their role in "slippery slope" reasoning.
Author: Stewart Shapiro
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199280398
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 241
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Book Description
Stewart Shapiro's aim in Vagueness in Context is to develop both a philosophical and a formal, model-theoretic account of the meaning, function, and logic of vague terms in an idealized version of a natural language like English. It is a commonplace that the extensions of vague terms vary with such contextual factors as the comparison class and paradigm cases. A person can be tall with respect to male accountants and not tall (even short) with respect to professionalbasketball players. The main feature of Shapiro's account is that the extensions (and anti-extensions) of vague terms also vary in the course of a conversation, even after the external contextual features, such as the comparison class, are fixed. A central thesis is that in some cases, a competent speaker ofthe language can go either way in the borderline area of a vague predicate without sinning against the meaning of the words and the non-linguistic facts. Shapiro calls this open texture, borrowing the term from Friedrich Waismann.The formal model theory has a similar structure to the supervaluationist approach, employing the notion of a sharpening of a base interpretation. In line with the philosophical account, however, the notion of super-truth does not play a central role in the development of validity. The ultimate goal of the technical aspects of the work is to delimit a plausible notion of logical consequence, and to explore what happens with the sorites paradox.Later chapters deal with what passes for higher-order vagueness - vagueness in the notions of 'determinacy' and 'borderline' - and with vague singular terms, or objects. In each case, the philosophical picture is developed by extending and modifying the original account. This is followed with modifications to the model theory and the central meta-theorems.As Shapiro sees it, vagueness is a linguistic phenomenon, due to the kinds of languages that humans speak. But vagueness is also due to the world we find ourselves in, as we try to communicate features of it to each other. Vagueness is also due to the kinds of beings we are. There is no need to blame the phenomenon on any one of those aspects.
Author: Roy A. Sorensen
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781383037487
Category : Contradiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Written in Sorensen's unique style, inventive and amusing, Vagueness and Contradiction has some serious things to say about language and logic, about the way the world is and about our understanding of it.
Author: Richard Dietz
Publisher:
ISBN: 0199570388
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 599
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Book Description
Vagueness is a deeply puzzling aspect of the relation between language and the world. Is it a feature of the way we represent reality in language, or a feature of reality itself? How can we reason with vague concepts? Cuts and Clouds presents the latest work towards an understanding of these puzzles about the nature and logic of vagueness.
Author: Claudia Maienborn
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 311062639X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 578
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Book Description
Discover vital research on the lexical and cognitive meanings of words. In this exciting book from a team of world-class researchers, in-depth articles explain a wide range of topics, including thematic roles, sense relation, ambiguity and comparison. The authors focus on the cognitive and conceptual structure of words and their meaning extensions such as coercion, metaphors and metonymies. The book features highly cited material – available in paperback for the first time since its publication – and is an essential starting point for anyone interested in lexical semantics, especially where it meets other cognitive and conceptual research.
Author: Torkil Lauesen
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781989701034
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 174
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Book Description
In The Principal Contradiction, Torkil Lauesen introduces readers to the philosophy of dialectical materialism as a tool for changing the world. Dialectical materialism allows us to understand the dynamics of world history and to draw practical conclusions, with the concept of contradiction building a bridge between theory and practice. This is not just a valuable tool with which to analyze complex relationships: it also tells us how to intervene.Lauesen explores the historical origins of dialectical materialism, focusing at first on the European context in which Hegel was famously turned on his head, then introducing the subsequent contributions made by Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Mao. Drawing on his own decades of experience as an anti-imperialist, Lauesen shows how dialectical materialism can be employed as a method to understand the past five hundred years of capitalist history, how contradictions internal to European capitalism led to colonialism and genocide in Asia, Africa, and the Americas, as all humanity was brought into a single exploitative world system. The historical record is used to show how contradictions interact with one another and how a correct understanding of the principal contradiction is critical to formulating a correct strategy.
Author: Rick Nouwen
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3642184464
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 213
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Book Description
This book constitutes the proceedings of the International Workshop on Vagueness in Communication, VIC 2009, held as part of ESSLLI 2009, in Bordeaux, France, July 20-24, 2009. The 11 contributions presented shed a light on new aspects in the area of vagueness in natural language communication. In contrast to the classical instruments of dealing with vagueness - like multi-valued logics, truth value gaps or gluts, or supervaluations - this volume presents new approaches like context-sensitivity of vagueness, the sharpening of vague predicates in context, and the modeling of precision levels.
Author: Dominic Hyde
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131700289X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 239
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Book Description
The topic of vagueness re-emerged in the twentieth century from relative obscurity. It deals with the phenomenon in natural language that manifests itself in apparent semantic indeterminacy - the indeterminacy, for example, that arises when asked to draw the line between the tall and non-tall, or the drunk and the sober. An associated paradox emphasises the challenging nature of the phenomenon, presenting one of the most resilient paradoxes of logic. The apparent threat posed for orthodox theories of the semantics and logic of natural language has become the focus of intense philosophical scrutiny amongst philosophers and non-philosophers alike. Vagueness, Logic and Ontology explores various responses to the philosophical problems generated by vagueness and its associated paradox - the sorites paradox. Hyde argues that the theoretical space in which vagueness is sometimes ontologically grounded and modelled by a truth-functional logic affords a coherent response to the problems posed by vagueness. Showing how the concept of vagueness can be applied to the world, Hyde's ontological account proposes a substantial revision of orthodox semantics, metaphysics and logic. This book will be of particular interest to readers in philosophy, linguistics, cognitive science and geographic information systems.
Author: Gisela Febel
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3658377844
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 373
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Book Description
“Contradiction” is a core concept in the humanities and the social sciences. Beside the classical ideas of logical or dialectical contradiction, instances of “lived” contradiction and strategies of coping with it are objects of this study. Contradiction Studies discuss the many ways in which explicit or implicit contradictions are negotiated in different political or cultural settings. This volume collects articles that tackle the concept of contradiction, practices of contradicting and lived contradictions from a number of relevant perspectives and assembles contributions from linguistics, literary studies, philosophy, political science, and media studies.
