Vagueness: A Reader (Bradford Books) [Hardcover]

Rosanna Keefe (Editor), Peter Smith (Editor)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0262112256 | ISBN-13: 978-0262112253 | Publication Date: September 1997

Vagueness is currently the subject of vigorous debate in the philosophy of logic and language. Vague terms-such as "tall", "red", "bald", and "tadpole" - have borderline cases (arguably, someone may be neither tall nor not tall); and they lack well-defined extensions (there is no sharp boundary between tall people and the rest). The phenomenon of vagueness poses a fundamental challenge to classical logic and semantics, which assumes that propositions are either true or false and that extensions are determinate. Another striking problem to which vagueness gives rise is the sorites paradox. If you remove one grain from a heap of sand, surely you must be left with a heap. Yet apply this principle repeatedly as you remove grains one by one, and you end up, absurdly, with a solitary grain that counts as a heap. This anthology collects papers in the field. After an introduction that surveys the field, the essays form four groups, starting with some historically notable pieces. The 1970s saw an explosion of interest in vagueness, and the second group of essays reprints classic papers from this period. The following group of papers represent current work on the logic and semantics of vagueness. The essays in the final group are contributions to the continuing debate about vague objects and vague identity.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"This balanced and comprehensive collection will be a standard reference for many years to come." Alice Kyburg , Computational Linguistics

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

About the Author

Rosanna Keefe is a Research Fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge University. Peter Smith is a member of the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Mit Pr (September 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0262112256
• ISBN-13: 978-0262112253
• Product Dimensions: 9.8 x 6.6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,938,095 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best First Book Available on the Subject, July 22, 2003

By 

Mark Silcox (The American Southwest.) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Vagueness: A Reader (Paperback)

I found this book enormously helpful. It contains most of the classic recent papers on vagueness in the analytic tradition from Dummett onward, plus a little pre-history, a few small curiosities (the papers by Tye and Machina, for example, seem to have been included mostly for their novelty value, but I found them both interesting and worth the effort) and a very comprehensive introdution that covers most of the main theories of vagueness that contemporary philosophers tend to find most plausible. The issue of vagueness is slowly coming to attract the same intensity and vigor of debate that the issue of analyticity did in the 1950s and 1960s, and this makes the value of Keefe and Smith's work almost impossible to measure. If only more anthologies of recent work in philosophy were assembled this carefully and intelligently!