Linguistique de l’écrit

Revue internationale en libre accès

Revue | Volume | Article

234591

Tolerance and higher-order vagueness

Peter Pagin

pp. 3727-3760

Résumé

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’.

Détails de la publication

Publié dans:

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

Pages: 3727-3760

DOI: 10.1007/s11229-015-0798-x

Citation complète:

Pagin Peter, 2017, Tolerance and higher-order vagueness. Synthese 194 (10), Vagueness and probability, 3727-3760. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0798-x.