Robert van Rooij presents an original framework dealing with the formalization of vague predicates. His solution is based on a non-classical entailment, which he calls tolerant entailment. The author thoroughly discusses the relation of his solution to the major approaches to vagueness (supervaluationism, contextualism, epistemic approaches, . . . ) and gives an analysis of higher order vaguene...

In this paper I present and defend a definition of vagueness, and draw out some consequences of accepting this definition. §1 asks what we should properly expect of a definition of vagueness, and §2 reviews existing definitions. §3 explains a key background notion necessary to an understanding of the definition to be presented here. §4 presents this definition, and §5 explains its advantages. §...

This article examines the role of “gifts” and “giftedness” in two recent novels about Occupy Wall Street, Barbara Browning's The Gift Caleb Crain's Overthrow . Together these explore how projects designed to offset effects neoliberal individualism very often end up replicating, rather than disrupting, aspects capitalist exchange: authors temper their own utopian impulses by interrogating factor...

Previous studies have used the Innovative Moments Coding System (IMCS) to describe the process of change in Narrative Therapy (NT) and in Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT). This study aims to extend this research program to a sample of Client-Centered Therapy (CCT). The IMCS was applied to six cases of CCT for depression to track the Innovative Moments (IMs) which are exceptions to the problematic ...

BACKGROUND Systematic studies of the efficacy of Narrative Therapy (NT) for depression are sparse. OBJECTIVE To evaluate the efficacy of individual NT for moderate depression in adults compared to Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT). METHOD Sixty-three depressed clients were assigned to either NT or CBT. The Beck Depression Inventory-II (BDI-II) and Outcome Questionnaire-45.2 (OQ-45.2) were ...

There are ~900,000 new HIV infections among women every year, representing nearly half of all new HIV infections globally. In the US, nearly one-fifth of all new HIV infections occur among women, and women from racial and ethnic minority communities experience disproportionately high rates of new HIV infections. Thus, there is a need to develop and implement effective HIV prevention strategies ...

When communicating with animated agents in a virtual space through natural language dialogue, it is necessary to deal with vagueness of language. To deal with vagueness, in particular vagueness of spatial relation, this paper proposes a new representation of locations. The representation is designed to have bilateral character, symbolic and numeric, in order to bridge the gap between the symbol...

The paper describes methodology of dealing with financial modelling under uncertainty with risk and vagueness aspects. An approach to modelling risks by the Value at Risk methodology under imprecise and soft conditions is solved. It is supposed that the input data and problem conditions is difficult to determine as real numbers or as some precise distribution function. Thus, vagueness is modell...

We propose a novel semantic analysis of the mass/count distinction, within a new framework combining the theory of mereology with Probabilistic Type Theory with Records, Prob-TTR (Cooper et al. 2014)). While the notions akin to VAGUENESS (Chierchia 2010) and OVERLAP (Landman 2011) are needed to ground this distinction, neither on its own is sufficient to accommodate the whole range of data, esp...

This paper presents an application of the theory of granular partitions proposed in (Smith and Brogaard, to appear), (Smith and Bittner 2001) to the phenomenon of vagueness. We understand vagueness as a semantic property of names and predicates. This is in contrast to those views which hold that there are intrinsically vague objects or attributes in reality and thus conceive vagueness in a de r...