
Vagueness - mercer
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/vagueness/
======
ScottBurson
My eyes were starting to glaze over until I came to this wonderful H. G. Wells
quote:

"Every species is vague, every term goes cloudy at its edges, and so in my way
of thinking, relentless logic is only another name for stupidity — for a sort
of intellectual pigheadedness. If you push a philosophical or metaphysical
enquiry through a series of valid syllogisms — never committing any generally
recognized fallacy — you nevertheless leave behind you at each step a certain
rubbing and marginal loss of objective truth and you get deflections that are
difficult to trace, at each phase in the process. Every species waggles about
in its definition, every tool is a little loose in its handle, every scale has
its individual. — _First and Last Things_ (1908)"

~~~
freshhawk
Damn, that is a great quote. And I went and read late-Wittgenstein[1] to get
that idea nailed down (admittedly with a hell of a lot more but he is not an
easy read). His concept of "word games" is an excellent thinking tool to have
available.

This general idea is also a necessary vaccine against a lot of terrible ...
LessWrong style "philosophy" (sigh, of all the place to feel compelled to make
that statement)

[1]
[https://philosophyforchange.wordpress.com/2014/03/11/meaning...](https://philosophyforchange.wordpress.com/2014/03/11/meaning-
is-use-wittgenstein-on-the-limits-of-language/) and
[https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/was-
wittgen...](https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/was-wittgenstein-
right/) are pretty good

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aschampion
If you're intrigued by this SEP article I would recommend going through [1]
and [2] together, since they are both grouped in similar order by schools of
thought on sorites paradox. The former is a well edited collection of papers
on each position, and the latter is Timothy Williamson's frequently persuasive
critique of each. I'm generally disinterested in analytic philosophy of
language, but find myself returning again and again to this discussion because
it is a frequent analog to a vast set of related problems.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Vagueness-Reader-Rosanna-
Keefe/dp/026...](https://www.amazon.com/Vagueness-Reader-Rosanna-
Keefe/dp/0262611457) [2] [https://www.amazon.com/Vagueness-Problems-
Philosophy-Timothy...](https://www.amazon.com/Vagueness-Problems-Philosophy-
Timothy-Williamson/dp/0415139805)

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panic
Are there any terms which are not vague?

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danblick
This is a joke, right?

~~~
Jimmy
Why do you think it's a joke?

~~~
danblick
Strikes me as a Sokal-style joke about bad writing in philosophy.

"A glut is a proposition that is both true and false. The rule for assigning
gluts is the mirror image of the rule for assigning gaps: A statement is true
exactly if it comes out true on at least one precisification."

~~~
Jimmy
It's not bad writing, and it's certainly not a Sokal-style hoax. These are the
kinds of things that philosophers think about and this is how they write about
them. I take it you're just not familiar with modern academic philosophy? Is
it the terminology that's throwing you off? For comparison, here's a random
snippet from the Wikipedia article on algebraic geometry:

"Like for affine algebraic sets, there is a bijection between the projective
algebraic sets and the reduced homogeneous ideals which define them. The
projective varieties are the projective algebraic sets whose defining ideal is
prime."

Wouldn't that also sound like nonsensical or bad writing to someone unfamiliar
with the field? But of course, it's not nonsense.

