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Vagueness

plato.stanford.edu

45 pointsmercer10 comments

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)"

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... and https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/was-wittgen... are pretty good

also known as "all abstractions are leaky"

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/11/11/the-law-of-leaky-a...

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... [2] https://www.amazon.com/Vagueness-Problems-Philosophy-Timothy...

Are there any terms which are not vague?

This is a joke, right?

Why do you think it's a joke?

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."

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.

I'm not sure why you find that Sokal-style. Unfamiliar terminology aside, it's clear and unambiguous -- you could directly rewrite it as a mathematical definition, for example.

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