I outline an interpretive theory of vagueness, emphasizing its advantages as a theory of language in use, compatibility with the data of descriptive linguistics, and its explanation for the interest-relativity of vagueness. Central to the theory is the notion that a 'language' in the usual sense is not a well-defined object but a cluster of more or less similar sound-meaning mappings which spea...

The huge number of available documents on the Web makes finding relevant ones a challenging task. The quality of results that traditional full-text search engines provide is still not optimal for many types of user queries. Especially the vagueness of natural languages, abstract concepts, semantic relations and temporal issues are handled inadequately by full-text search. Ontologies and semanti...

What makes a predicate subjective? For example, why is it that (bare) predicates of personal taste like tasty, disgusting and fun are subjective according to certain tests (which we will examine in more detail below), but “phenomenological category” predicates like semantic(al), metaphysical and epistemological are not? To a certain extent at least, this question is independent of the question ...

If there are fundamental laws of nature, can they fail to be exact? In this paper, I consider the possibility that some vague. call phenomenon nomic vagueness. characterize vagueness as existence borderline lawful worlds and presence several other accompanying features. Under certain assumptions, such prevents physical theory from being completely expressible in mathematical language. Moreover,...