Central and East European
Society for Phenomenology

Repository | Journal | Volume | Article

234591

Tolerance and higher-order vagueness

Peter Pagin

pp. 3727-3760

Abstract

The idea of higher-order vagueness is usually associated with conceptions of vagueness that focus on the existence of borderline cases. What sense can be made of it within a conception of vagueness that focuses on tolerance instead? A proposal is offered here. It involves understanding ‘definitely’ not as a sentence operator but as a predicate modifier, and more precisely as an intensifier, that is, an operator that shifts the predicate extension along a scale. This idea is combined with the author’s earlier approach to the semantics of vague expressions, which builds on the idea of a central gap associated with a predicate. The central gap approach is generalized to handle arbitrarily many iterations of ‘definitely’.

Publication details

Published in:

Dietz Richard (2017) Vagueness and probability. Synthese 194 (10).

Pages: 3727-3760

DOI: 10.1007/s11229-015-0798-x

Full citation:

Pagin Peter (2017) „Tolerance and higher-order vagueness“. Synthese 194 (10), 3727–3760.