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Author: Giuseppina Scotto di Carlo
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443848891
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 310
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Book Description
Did Security Council resolutions authorise the use of force during the Second Gulf War? Did the UN intentionally use vague and indeterminate linguistic patterns as a set of discursive strategies with the overall legislative intent of using deliberate vagueness as a political strategy? Over the last few years, UN resolutions have been repeatedly questioned for the excessive presence of vagueness. In order to overcome the cultural divergences of recipient countries, UN diplomatic texts use vague words quite extensively, which could lead to biased or even strategically-motivated interpretations of resolutions, undermining their legal impact. This book proposes a linguistic analysis of whether the use of strategic vagueness in Security Council resolutions has contributed to the breakout of the Second Gulf War instead of a diplomatic solution to the controversy. The hypothesis is discussed through an analysis of the UN resolutions relating to the war, and reinforced through an analysis of US legislation related to the authorization for war, revealing how the US has interpreted UN legislation, in order to see how vague expressions used in UN resolutions have allowed the US to interpret them as a means to go to war. A second section of the work attempts to understand whether the same patterns have been used in resolutions relating to the Iranian nuclear crisis in 2010, revealing a relationship between the choice of vague linguistic features and the use of intentional vagueness as a political strategy.
Author: Giuseppina Scotto di Carlo
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443848891
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 310
Get Book Here
Book Description
Did Security Council resolutions authorise the use of force during the Second Gulf War? Did the UN intentionally use vague and indeterminate linguistic patterns as a set of discursive strategies with the overall legislative intent of using deliberate vagueness as a political strategy? Over the last few years, UN resolutions have been repeatedly questioned for the excessive presence of vagueness. In order to overcome the cultural divergences of recipient countries, UN diplomatic texts use vague words quite extensively, which could lead to biased or even strategically-motivated interpretations of resolutions, undermining their legal impact. This book proposes a linguistic analysis of whether the use of strategic vagueness in Security Council resolutions has contributed to the breakout of the Second Gulf War instead of a diplomatic solution to the controversy. The hypothesis is discussed through an analysis of the UN resolutions relating to the war, and reinforced through an analysis of US legislation related to the authorization for war, revealing how the US has interpreted UN legislation, in order to see how vague expressions used in UN resolutions have allowed the US to interpret them as a means to go to war. A second section of the work attempts to understand whether the same patterns have been used in resolutions relating to the Iranian nuclear crisis in 2010, revealing a relationship between the choice of vague linguistic features and the use of intentional vagueness as a political strategy.
Author: Geert Keil
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198782888
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 353
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Book Description
Vague expressions are omnipresent in natural language. As such, their use in legal texts is virtually inevitable. If a law contains vague terms, the question whether it applies to a particular case often lacks a clear answer. One of the fundamental pillars of the rule of law is legal certainty. The determinacy of the law enables people to use it as a guide and places judges in the position to decide impartially. Vagueness poses a threat to these ideals. In borderline cases, the law seems to be indeterminate and thus incapable of serving its core rule of law value. In the philosophy of language, vagueness has become one of the hottest topics of the last two decades. Linguists and philosophers have investigated what distinguishes "soritical" vagueness from other kinds of linguistic indeterminacy, such as ambiguity, generality, open texture, and family resemblance concepts. There is a vast literature that discusses the logical, semantic, pragmatic, and epistemic aspects of these phenomena. Legal theory has hitherto paid little attention to the differences between the various kinds of linguistic indeterminacy that are grouped under the heading of "vagueness", let alone to the various theories that try to account for these phenomena. Bringing together leading scholars working on the topic of vagueness in philosophy and in law, this book fosters a dialogue between philosophers and legal scholars by examining how philosophers conceive vagueness in law from their theoretical perspective and how legal theorists make use of philosophical theories of vagueness. The chapters of the book are organized into three parts. The first part addresses the import of different theories of vagueness for the law, referring to a wide range of theories from supervaluationist to contextualist and semantic realist accounts in order to address the question of whether the law can learn from engaging with philosophical discussions of vagueness. The second part of the book examines different vagueness phenomena. The contributions in part 2 suggest that the greater awareness to different vagueness phenomena can make lawyers aware of specific issues and solutions so far overlooked. The third part deals with the pragmatic aspects of vagueness in law, providing answers to the question of how to deal with vagueness in law and with the professional, political, moral, and ethical issues such vagueness gives rise to.
Author: Geert Keil
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198722370
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 277
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Book Description
Blurred boundaries between the normal and the pathological are a recurrent theme in almost every publication concerned with the classification of mental disorders. Yet, systematic approaches that take into account discussions about vagueness are rare. This volume is the first in the psychiatry/philosophy literature to tackle this problem.
Author: Margaret Canovan
Publisher: Polity
ISBN: 9780745628219
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 184
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Book Description
This groundbreaking study sets out to clarify one of the most influential but least studied of all political concepts. Despite continual talk of popular sovereignty, the idea of the people has been neglected by political theorists who have been deterred by its vagueness. Margaret Canovan argues that it deserves serious analysis, and that it's many ambiguities point to unresolved political issues. The book begins by charting the conflicting meanings of the people, especially in Anglo-American usage, and traces the concept's development from the ancient populus Romanus to the present day. The book's main purpose is, however, to analyse the political issues signalled by the people's ambiguities. In the remaining chapters, Margaret Canovan considers their theoretical and practical aspects: Where are the people's boundaries? Is people equivalent to nation, and how is it related to humanity - people in general? Populists aim to 'give power back to the people'; how is populism related to democracy? How can the sovereign people be an immortal collective body, but at the same time be us as individuals? Can we ever see that sovereign people in action? Political myths surround the figure of the people and help to explain its influence; should the people itself be regarded as fictional? This original and accessible study sheds a fresh light on debates about popular sovereignty, and will be an important resource for students and scholars of political theory.
Author: Nicholas J. J. Smith
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191552712
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 351
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Book Description
In Vagueness and Degrees of Truth, Nicholas Smith develops a new theory of vagueness: fuzzy plurivaluationism. A predicate is said to be vague if there is no sharply defined boundary between the things to which it applies and the things to which it does not apply. For example, 'heavy' is vague in a way that 'weighs over 20 kilograms' is not. A great many predicates - both in everyday talk, and in a wide array of theoretical vocabularies, from law to psychology to engineering - are vague. Smith argues, on the basis of a detailed account of the defining features of vagueness, that an accurate theory of vagueness must involve the idea that truth comes in degrees. The core idea of degrees of truth is that while some sentences are true and some are false, others possess intermediate truth values: they are truer than the false sentences, but not as true as the true ones. Degree-theoretic treatments of vagueness have been proposed in the past, but all have encountered significant objections. In light of these, Smith develops a new type of degree theory. Its innovations include a definition of logical consequence that allows the derivation of a classical consequence relation from the degree-theoretic semantics, a unified account of degrees of truth and subjective probabilities, and the incorporation of semantic indeterminacy - the view that vague statements need not have unique meanings - into the degree-theoretic framework. As well as being essential reading for those working on vagueness, Smith's book provides an excellent entry-point for newcomers to the era - both from elsewhere in philosophy, and from computer science, logic and engineering. It contains a thorough introduction to existing theories of vagueness and to the requisite logical background.
Author: Rosanna Keefe
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262112256
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 363
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Book Description
Vagueness is currently the subject of vigorous debate in the philosophy of logic and language. Vague terms-such as "tall", "red", "bald", and "tadpole" -- have borderline cases (arguably, someone may be neither tall nor not tall); and they lack well-defined extensions (there is no sharp boundary between tall people and the rest). The phenomenon of vagueness poses a fundamental challenge to classical logic and semantics, which assumes that propositions are either true or false and that extensions are determinate. Another striking problem to which vagueness gives rise is the sorites paradox. If you remove one grain from a heap of sand, surely you must be left with a heap. Yet apply this principle repeatedly as you remove grains one by one, and you end up, absurdly, with a solitary grain that counts as a heap. This anthology collects papers in the field. After an introduction that surveys the field, the essays form four groups, starting with some historically notable pieces. The 1970s saw an explosion of interest in vagueness, and the second group of essays reprints classic papers from this period. The following group of papers represent current work on the logic and semantics of vagueness. The essays in the final group are contributions to the continuing debate about vague objects and vague identity.
Author: Martin Vöhler
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110715813
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 431
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Book Description
Ambiguity in the sense of two or more possible meanings is considered to be a distinctive feature of modern art and literature. It characterizes the "open artwork" (Eco) and is generated by "disruptive tactics" (Wellershoff) and strategies to engender uncertainty. While ambiguity is seen as a "paradigm of modernity" (Bode), there is skepticism regarding its use in the pre-modern era. Older studies were dominated by the conviction that there was a lack of ambiguity in pre-modernity because, according to the rules of the "old rhetoric", ambiguity was seen as an avoidable error (vitium) and a violation of the dictate of clarity (perspicuitas). The aim of the volume is to re-examine the putative "absence of ambiguity" in the pre-modern era. Is it not possible to find clear examples of deliberately employed (intended) ambiguity in antiquity? Are the oracles and riddles, the Palinode of Stesichoros and Socrates (Phaedrus), the dissoi logoi of rhetoric, the ambiguities of the tragedies all exceptions or do they not indicate a distinct interest in the artistic use of ambiguity? The presentations of the conference, which will include scholars from various philologies, will combine a recourse to theoretical concepts of intended ambiguity with exemplary analyses from the field of pre-modern art and literature.
Author: Gert de Roo
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317131142
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 246
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Book Description
Many of the key notions associated with spatial planning are essentially ’fuzzy’ in their nature. For example, while almost everyone accepts ’sustainability’ as an important goal of planning, the actions of the actors involved can render the achieved ’sustainability’ minimal, or even counterproductive. Putting forward an innovative way of looking at planning problems and policies, this volume suggests actor-consulting is important in addressing the fuzzy nature of planning. A tool to address differences in understanding, actor-consulting is based on an analysis of actor motives, perceptions and contributions. By inviting all actors to express their desired, actual and potential contributions to achieving an agreed outcome to a local policy issue, decision-makers have a means to develop their goals in line with the roles, motivation, perception and behaviour of the various actors involved. Including contributions from Patsy Healy, Johan Woltjer, Don Miller and Karel Martens, the book presents a variety of case studies which demonstrate the use of the actor-consulting model in addressing planning issues.
Author: Andreas H. Jucker
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027225540
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 208
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Book Description
Jucker endeavors to test pragmatic concepts (such as Grice's principles of conversational inference) by applying them to concrete data. This application leads to suggestions for various modifications in the available pragmatic methodology. While pursuing this theoretical goal, he makes a significant contribution to descriptive pragmatics by offering a detailed picture of linguistically relevant aspects of news interviews, which show communicative behavior in 'laboratory conditions' where as many influencing factors as possible are kept stable while the influence of one specific factor at a time can be tested.
Author: Rosanna Keefe
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521650674
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 249
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Book Description
A powerful comparative study of the main theories of vagueness, first published in 2000.
