Vagueness: A Global Approach

Kit Fine

Apr 2020 · Oxford University Press

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Vagueness is a subject of long-standing interest in the philosophy of language, metaphysics, and philosophical logic. Numerous accounts of vagueness have been proposed in the literature but there has been no general consensus on which, if any, should be be accepted. Kit Fine here presents a new theory of vagueness based on the radical hypothesis that vagueness is a "global" rather than a "local" phenomenon. In other words, according to Fine, the vagueness of an object or expression cannot properly be considered except in its relation to other objects or other expressions. He then applies the theory to a variety of topics in logic, metaphysics and epistemology, including the sorites paradox, the problem of personal identity, and the transparency of mental phenomenon. This is the inaugural volume in the Rutgers Lectures in Philosophy series, presenting lectures from the most important contemporary thinkers in the discipline.

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Kit Fine is University Professor and Silver Professor of Philosophy and Mathematics at New York University. He has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies, is the recepient of the Annalieser Meier Award from the Humboldt Foundation, and is a former editor of the Journal of Symbolic Logic. His main areas of interest are logic, metaphysics, and philosophy of language, though he has published in other areas ranging from economic theory to computer science. He is the author of over a hundred articles in philosophy as well as Reasoning with Arbitrary Objects (1985), The Limits of Abstraction (2002), Modality and Tense (2005) and Semantic Relationism (2007).