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Vagueness

Should We Take Vagueness Seriously?

Apostolos Syropoulos argues that vagueness is a virtue, sometimes.

Many descriptive words, such as ‘tall’, ‘beautiful’, ‘fat’, etc, etc, have something in common: they do not convey a precisely defined meaning. I assume you will agree with me that there is no general consensus on who is a tall person, who is a beautiful person, etc. Consider someone whose height is 170 cm (5ft 6in). Is this a tall person? If they’re male, we’re not really sure; but if the person is female, then she is definitely tall, particularly if she’s from a Mediterranean country. On the other hand, although we have learnt that the opposite of, say, ‘beautiful’ is ‘ugly’, still, that’s not the whole truth: There are millions of people out there that are not beautiful, but they’re not ugly either.

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