When asked to indicate which items from a set of candidates belong to a particular natural language category inter-individual differences occur: Individuals disagree which items should be considered category members. The premise of this paper is that these inter-individual differences in semantic categorization reflect both ambiguity and vagueness. Categorization differences are said to be due ...

This paper provides a unified solution to two puzzles involving vagueness and scalar adjectives of the absolute lexical class (ex. bald, empty, straight etc.). The first puzzle concerns the proper analysis of the relationship between contextual effects associated with absolute adjectives and those associated with relative adjectives like tall, long or expensive. The dominant view in philosophy ...

This paper provides a unified solution to two puzzles involving vagueness and scalar adjectives of the absolute lexical class (ex. bald, empty, straight etc.). The first puzzle concerns the proper analysis of the relationship between contextual effects associated with absolute adjectives and those associated with relative adjectives like tall, long or expensive. The dominant view in philosophy ...

The main aim of the investigation of hedge algebras is to discover an algebraic structure in the category of universal algebras of terms-domains of linguistic variables or to establish an algebraic approach to the semantic structure of terms-domains. The meaning of linguistic terms in general is vague, however vagueness is a concept which is difficult to be defined formally and reasonably. Moti...

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...

It is taken for granted in much of the literature on vagueness that semantic and epistemic approaches to vagueness are fundamentally at odds. If we can analyze borderline cases and the sorites paradox in terms of degrees of truth, then we don’t need an epistemic explanation. Conversely, if an epistemic explanation suffices, then there is no reason to depart from the familiar simplicity of class...

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...

Many English noun pairs suggest an almost limitless array of semantic interpretation. A fruit bowl might be described as a bowl for fruit, a bowl that contains fruit, a bowl for holding fruit, or even (perhaps in a modern sculpture class), a bowl made out of fruit. These interpretations vary in syntax, semantic denotation, plausibility, and level of semantic detail. For example, a headache pill...