Vagueness: A Reader

By: Kenney, Rosanna

Book Overview

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. This anthology collects for the first time the most important papers in the field. After a substantial 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 the best recent 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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0262611457
• ISBN13: 9780262611459
• Release Date: January 1999
• Publisher: MIT Press
• Length: 368 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.2" x 9.1"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Best First Book Available on the Subject

I found this book enormously helpful. It contains most of the classic recent papers on vagueness in the analytic tradition from Dummett onward, plus a little pre-history, a few small curiosities (the papers by Tye and Machina, for example, seem to have been included mostly for their novelty value, but I found them both interesting and worth the effort) and a very comprehensive introdution that covers most of the main theories of vagueness that contemporary philosophers tend to find most plausible. The issue of vagueness is slowly coming to attract the same intensity and vigor of debate that the issue of analyticity did in the 1950s and 1960s, and this makes the value of Keefe and Smith's work almost impossible to measure. If only more anthologies of recent work in philosophy were assembled this carefully and intelligently!