Vague representation

Mind 117 (466):329-373 (2008)
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Abstract

The goal of this paper is to develop a theory of content for vague language. My proposal is based on the following three theses: (1) language-mastery is not rulebased— it involves a certain kind of decision-making; (2) a theory of content is to be thought of instrumentally—it is a tool for making sense of our linguistic practice; and (3) linguistic contents are only locally defined—they are only defined relative to suitably constrained sets of possibilities. CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    What's this?

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10.1093/mind/fzn029

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Agustin Rayo
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Citations of this work

Vagueness in Context.Stewart Shapiro - 2006 - Oxford, England: Oxford University Press UK.
A Plea for Semantic Localism.Agustín Rayo - 2011 - Noûs 47 (4):647-679.
Recent Work on Vagueness.M. Eklund - 2011 - Analysis 71 (2):352-363.
A metasemantic account of vagueness.Augustin Rayo - 2010 - In Richard Dietz & Sebastiano Moruzzi (eds.), Cuts and Clouds: Vagueness, its Nature, and its Logic. Oxford University Press. pp. 23--45.
The Sorites, Content Fixing, and the Roots of Paradox.Mario Gomez-Torrente - forthcoming - In Otávio Bueno & Ali Abasnezhad (eds.), On the Sorites Paradox. Cham: Springer.

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References found in this work

Convention: A Philosophical Study.David Kellogg Lewis - 1969 - Cambridge, MA, USA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Convention: A Philosophical Study.David Lewis - 1969 - Synthese 26 (1):153-157.
Assertion.Robert Stalnaker - 1978 - Syntax and Semantics (New York Academic Press) 9:315-332.
Vagueness.Timothy Williamson - 1995 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 46 (4):589-601.
Convention: A Philosophical Study.David K. Lewis - 1971 - Philosophy and Rhetoric 4 (2):137-138.

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