Vagueness: A Guide

This volume explores how vagueness matters as a specific problem in the context of theories that are primarily about something else. After an introductory chapter on the Sorites paradox, which exposes the various forms the paradox can take and some of the responses that have been pursued, the book proceeds with a chapter on vagueness and metaphysics, which covers important questions concerning vagueness that arise in connection with the deployment of certain key metaphysical notions. Subsequent chapters address the following: vagueness and logic, which discusses the sort of model theory that is suggested by the main, rival accounts of vagueness; vagueness and meaning, which focuses on contextualist, epistemicist, and indeterminist theories; vagueness and observationality; vagueness within linguistics, which focuses on approaches that take comparison classes into account; and the idea that vagueness in law is typically extravagant and that extravagant vagueness is a necessary feature of legal systems.

Giuseppina Ronzitti is specialized in philosophy of mathematics and defended her PhD thesis on mathematical intuitionism in 2002 in Genova (Italy). She has worked as a researcher in France (Archives Poincaré, Nancy) and in Finland (University of Helsinki) and has had longer and shorter stays in the Netherlands (Nijmegen), the US (University of Notre Dame, Indiana) and Norway (The Wittgenstein Archives, Bergen).