Not exactly : in praise of vagueness /

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Bibliographic Details
Author / Creator:	Deemter, Kees van.
Imprint:	Oxford : New York : Oxford University Press, 2010.
Description:	xvi, 341 p. : ill. ; 24 cm.
Language:	English
Subject:	Vagueness (Philosophy) Vagueness (Philosophy)
Format:	Print Book
URL for this record:	http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/7982528

Hidden Bibliographic Details
ISBN:	9780199545902 (hardback) 0199545901 (hardback) 9780199645732 (pbk.) 0199645736 (pbk.)
Notes:	Includes bibliographical references (p. 319-332) and index.
Summary:	"Our daily lives are full of vagueness or fuzziness. When we describe someone as "tall," for example, it is as though there is a particular height beyond which a person can be considered "tall." In this stimulating book, Kees Van Deemter cuts across various disciplines--including artificial intelligence, logic, and computer science - to illuminate the nature and importance of vagueness. Van Deemter shows why vagueness is both unavoidable and useful, and he demonstrates how tempting - and how wrong--it often is to think in terms of black and white, instead of the richly graded spectrum of the world around us. Vagueness, the author argues, allows us to focus on what matters, leaving out irrelevant details, and adding texture to what would otherwise be unintelligible facts. The embrace of vagueness, however, comes at a price, for when degrees of grey are accepted, concepts like truth, belief, and proof lose their power, and we are banished from that paradise in which truth and falsity are the only possibilities' -- Publisher's description.

Table of Contents:

List of Figures
Prologue
1. Introduction: False Clarity
Vagueness
Paradox
Academic perspectives on vagueness
Part I. Vagueness, Where One Least Expects It
2. Sex and Similarity: On the Fiction of Species
What is a species?
The Ensatina salamander
Lessons learned
3. Measurements that Matter
A short history of the metre
Obesity
Poverty
Intelligence
Dialogue intermezzo: After the job interviews
Scientific discovery and word meaning
4. Identity and Gradual Change
Identity: The case of Old Number One
Multiplying objects
Dialogue intermezzo: On Old Number One
What makes a book?
What makes a person?
What is a language?
Digression: Protection against change
So what?
5. Vagueness in Numbers and Maths
Vagueness in mathematics
Talking about numbers
Which computer program is fastest?
Statistical significance
Part II. Theories of Vagueness
6. The Linguistics of Vagueness
Chomsky's machine: Computing grammaticality
Montague's machine: Computing meaning
The role of language corpora
Vague adjectives
The meaning of adjectives
Vagueness and ambiguity
Lack of specificity
Prototypes
Comparatives
Packaging what we say: Hedging
Future work
7. Reasoning with Vague Information
Reasoning with vague concepts
The sorites paradox
Vagueness as ignorance
Similarity is in the eye of the beholder: The case of colour
Dialogue intermezzo: On vagueness as ignorance
Continuity and vagueness
8. Parrying a Paradox
Logic and paradox
A crash course in classical logic
First deviation: Supervaluations and partial logic
Second deviation: Context-aware reasoning
Third deviation: Introspective agents
9. Degrees of Truth
Fuzzy logic
Dialogue intermezzo: On fuzzy logic
Fuzzy logic and the sorites paradox
Probabilistic versions of many-valued logic
What's wrong with degrees?
Part III. Working Models of Vagueness
10. Artificial Intelligence
A brief history of AI
Artificial intelligence?
Qualitative reasoning
Applying fuzzy logic: An artificial doctor
The future of AI
11. When to be Vague: Computers as Authors
Example: Generating vague descriptions
Dialogue intermezzo: What use is a theory?
Tolerance revisited
A game theory perspective
Vagueness in the absence of conflict
Why do we speak?
12. The Expulsion from Boole's Paradise
Earlier questions revisited
Coping with vagueness
Epilogue: Guaranteed Correct
Notes
Recommended Reading
References
Index

Not exactly : in praise of vagueness /

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