Borderline Cases and the Collapsing Principle

Borderline cases and permissibility

The paper explores the idea that when a proposition p is borderline, p is permissible: we can assert p, deny p or suspend judgement about p for all we know, nothing mandates one of these attitudes. The vagueness of p leaves open what we have to think of p. Recognition that p is borderline amounts to be tolerant toward any of three following attitudes on p: 1) hesitant acceptance of p (positive ...

Borderline Cases, Incompatibilism and Plurivaluationism

Diana Raffman’s book “Unruly Words” is a remarkable achievement and contribution to the study of vagueness. Parts of Raffman’s book had circulated since at least 2008, in particular the last chapter (chapter 5), in which Raffman presents experimental results about dynamic sorites and discusses the phenomenon of hysteresis. My own work over the same period, like that of several colleagues and th...

Probability, fuzziness and borderline cases

An integrated approach to truth-gaps and epistemic uncertainty is described, based on probability distributions defined over a set of three-valued truth models. This combines the explicit representation of borderline cases with both semantic and stochastic uncertainty, in order to define measures of subjective belief in vague propositions. Within this framework we investigate bridges between pr...

Some Borderline Cases of Cycloaddition

Common cases of cycloaddition include concerted (2 + 4) and stepwise (2 + 2) reactions which latter are usually easily recognizable as involving biradicals or dipolar ions. The addition in situ of dichioroketene to 2,4-hexadiene and 2butene is stereospecific, as required by the (2 + 2a) mechanism, but is followed by rapid base-catalysed rearrangement of the resulting 2,2-dichiorocyclobutanones ...

Relapsed and Borderline Cases of Tuberculoid Leprosy