A SLIGHTLY MODIFIED ECONOMY PRINCIPLE: STABLE PROPERTIES HAVE NON-STABLE STANDARDS

Vagueness is a persuasive feature of adjectives (Kamp 1975; Kennedy 2007; van Rooij 2009). Consider, for example, the adjective tall. First, the truth value of sentences in the positive construction – sentences of the form x is tall – varies with context. For example, a person may be considered tall when compared with his age group and not tall when compared to basketball players. The truth value depends on a context dependent comparison class (Klein 1980). Second, some contextual comparison classes contain a point or an interval that ‘stands out’ to such a degree that it functions as a standard of membership, such that entities whose height exceeds the standard fall in the positive extension and other entities fall in the negative extension. However, in most cases, neither the comparison class nor the standard is fully determined. As a result, some entities exist for which we cannot say whether they are tall or not. They form an extension gap. Moreover, often there are no clear boundaries between the positive, negative, and extension gap. Third, vague adjectives are characterized by the Sorites paradox. For example, an entity 1mm shorter than a clearly tall entity is intuitively judged to be tall too, and so is any entity 1mm shorter, and so on. This leads to a paradoxical conclusion, a conclusion that we intuitively judge false, whereby any entity is tall. Some adjectives, however, are not as vague as others are. They are often called absolute adjectives to distinguish them from the vague context relative adjectives. As their name suggests,