Peirce and the specification of borderline vagueness
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David W. Agler
David W. Agler (b. 1982) is a lecturer at the Pennsylvania State University 〈dwa132@psu.edu〉. His research interests include Peirce, philosophy of language, American philosophy, and philosophy of logic. His publications include “The UFAIL approach: Unconventional weapons and their ‘unintended’ effects” (2010); “Peirce's direct, non-reductive contextual theory of names” (2011); “Symbolic logic: Syntax, semantics, and proof” (2012); and “Polanyi and Peirce on the critical method” (2012).
Abstract
Scholarship on borderline vagueness pinpoints Russell's 1923 essay titled “Vagueness” as the starting point for rigorous analysis. The importance of Russell's work over and above discussions of indeterminacy in antiquity and in the modern period is that Russell isolated borderline vagueness from indeterminacies that do not threaten classical logic. This paper argues that historical propriety concerning the analysis of borderline vagueness belongs to Peirce since he was the first to show that borderline vagueness is distinct from other forms of indeterminacy (e.g., generality, unspecificity, and uninformativeness) and that the application of vague predicates to borderline cases involves an intrinsic uncertainty.
About the author
David W. Agler (b. 1982) is a lecturer at the Pennsylvania State University 〈dwa132@psu.edu〉. His research interests include Peirce, philosophy of language, American philosophy, and philosophy of logic. His publications include “The UFAIL approach: Unconventional weapons and their ‘unintended’ effects” (2010); “Peirce's direct, non-reductive contextual theory of names” (2011); “Symbolic logic: Syntax, semantics, and proof” (2012); and “Polanyi and Peirce on the critical method” (2012).
©[2013] by Walter de Gruyter Berlin Boston
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Artikel in diesem Heft
- Masthead
- Linguistics through its proper mirror-glass: Saussure, signs, segments
- The interrelation of metaphors and metonymies in sign systems of visual art: An example analysis of works by V. I. Surikov
- Information-theoretic confirmation of semiotic structures
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- An integrational response to Searlean realism, or how language does not relate to consciousness
- Peirce, meaning, and the Semantic Web
- The puzzling world of Harry Potter
- The sign system of human pretending
- Place and subjectivity in contemporary world: An analysis of Lost in Translation based on the semiotics of passion
- Peirce and the specification of borderline vagueness
- Marks as masks: A study of traditional African occupations and their visual indices
- The linguistic sign at the lexicon-syntax interface: Assumptions and implications of the Generative Lexicon Theory
- Presence of la femme: The semiotic silence
- On trans-semiosis
- Individual variation in participants' account of their own interaction
- From funeral to wedding ceremony: Change in the metaphoric nature of the Chinese color term white
