Vagueness and Language Use (Innbundet (stive permer))

PAUL EGRE is a CNRS Research Fellow at Institut Jean-Nicod and a member of the Department of Cognitive Studies at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. His main research areas are the philosophy of language, philosophical logic, and epistemology. Since 2008 he has been leading an ANR project on the cognitive sources of vagueness. He is an associate editor of the Journal of Philosophical Logic, of Disputatio, and one of the founders and executive editors of the Review of Philosophy and Psychology. NATHAN KLINEDINST earned a PhD in linguistics from UCLA, and is now a Lecturer in Linguistics at University College London, UK. His areas of research interest are formal semantics and pragmatics, with a focus on conditionals and modality.

Most of the expressions we use in ordinary language are vague, in the sense that their meaning does not allow us to specify a unique and constant boundary between the objects to which they apply and those to which they don't. An adjective like 'young', for instance, does not select for a sharp range of ages (does 29 still count as 'young'? what about 37, 43?); likewise a determiner like 'many' does not determine a precise number of objects in order to count as many. The phenomenon of vagueness raises substantial puzzles about how we reason and manage to communicate successfully with vague expressions. This volume brings together twelve papers by linguists and philosophers which contribute novel empirical and formal considerations to theorizing about vagueness, with special attention to the linguistic mechanisms by which vagueness is regulated. The volume is organized in three main parts which concern respectively: * the link between vagueness, gradability and the expression of comparison in language (how does the meaning of the vague adjective 'young' relate to that of the precise comparative 'younger'?)* the semantics of degree adverbs and intensifiers (how do adverbs like 'clearly', 'approximately' or 'surprisingly' constrain the meaning of the expressions they modify?) * ways of evading the sorites paradox (what are the prospects for contextualist and pragmatic solutions?)

CHRIS BARKER is Professor, Department of Linguistics, New York University, USA PABLO COBREROS teaches Logic and Philosophy of Science at The University of Navarra, Spain ARIEL COHEN is Senior Lecturer of Linguistics, Ben Gurion University, Israel DELIA GRAFF FARA is Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, Princeton University, USA SCOTT FULTS University of Maryland, USA CHRISTOPHER KENNEDY is Professor and Chair, Department of Linguistics, University of Chicago, USA RICK NOUWEN is Senior Research Fellow, Utrecht Institute for Linguistics, The Netherlands PETER PAGIN Department of Philosophy, Stockholm University, Sweden GALIT W. SASSOON Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC), University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands ULI SAUERLAND is Research Team Leader at the Centre for General Linguistics (ZAS) Berlin, Germany PENKA STATEVA is Associate Professor of Linguistics University of Nova Gorica, Slovenia PAULA SWEENEY is Research and Operations Officer, Department of Philosophy, University of Aberdeen, UK ROBERT VAN ROOIJ Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC), University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands LAVI WOLF Department of Foreign Literature, Ben Gurion University, Israel ELIA ZARDINI is Postdoctoral Research Fellow, the Northern Institute of Philosophy, University of Aberdeen, UK

Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors Introduction: P.Egre & N.Klinedinst PART I: MEASUREMENT AND COMPARISON Vagueness and Scales; S.Fults Implicit and Explicit Comparatives; R.van Rooij Vagueness and Comparison; C.Kennedy The Inhabitants of Vagueness Models; G.Sassoon PART II: APPROXIMATORS AND INTENSIFIERS Two Types of Vagueness; U.Sauerland & P.Stateva Degree Modifiers and Monotonicity; R.Nouwen Clarity as Objectivized Belief; A.Cohen & L.Wolf Reasoning about Public Evidence; C.Barker PART III: THE SORITES PARADOX Supervaluationism and Fara's Argument concerning Higher-Order Vagueness; P.Cobreros Truth in a Region; D.Fara Vagueness and Practical Interest; P.Sweeney & E.Zardini Vagueness and Domain Restriction; P.Pagin Index