Scalar vs. Epistemic Vagueness: Evidence from Approximators
By Uli Sauerland, Penka Stateva. 2007
70 citations recorded by the source corpus.
This paper is about vagueness in natural language. More specifically, we discuss lexical means of making vague assertions more or less precise. Examples of expressions that have this effect are approximately, absolutely, definitely, and roughly speaking. While many of these expressions are modifiers and adverbs, some such expressions are neither. Hence, for the purposes of this paper we call expressions that make vague assertions more or less precise Approximators. Our main claim is that the distribution of such expressions provides evidence for the view that vagueness in language comes in at least two varieties, which we call Scalar Vagueness and Epistemic Vagueness.1 We assume that vagueness is characterized by giving rise to the SoritesParadox. Consider the three examples in (1) through (3). In each case a SoritesParadox reasoning goes through: If we accept the premise that “If Harry is bald, it’s always true that, even if he had one more hair than he does, he would still be bald.”, which sounds innocent, it follows that (1) does not tell us anything about the number of hairs on Harry’s head. Similarly (2) would tell us how many grains of sand there are in the heap if we accept the premise that “if something is a heap of sand and we remove one grain from it, it is still a heap of sand.”. Finally, (3) wouldn’t tell us anything about the time of John’s arrival if we accept the premise that “if John arrived at 6 o’clock, then (3) would still be true if he arrived one second later than he actually did.”
Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Philosophy
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c3b769ed57964e534da65cac04f51a36fcc6b3b6
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In Artificial Intelligence
In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
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Citations in the corpus
- Gradability in the nominal domain (2011, background): “org/wiki/sheerly) 296 See Sauerland and Stateva (2007) for an analysis of its adverbial counterpart, perfectly, as a scalar approximator (i.”