Vagueness and Language Use

Terms like “red”, “bald” and “young” are vague. In formal and scientific approaches to the study of language and mind, this claim is standardly taken to point to three particular (related) features of their meaning or use (see for instance Keefe 2000, Kennedy 2007, Smith 2008). First, such predicates admit of borderline cases, cases to which they neither clearly apply, nor clearly fail to apply. For instance, we would readily admit that a 16-year-old man is young, and that a 90-year-old man is not young, but what about a man of 32? Of 37? Of 41? For cases like those, we may hesitate whether to declare the individual young or not.

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