Abstract
We seek to show that some properties of vague scalar adjectives are consequences of rational communication. Theories of vagueness are usually directed at a cluster of traditional philosophical desiderata: how vagueness fits into a theory of truth (or metaphysics), the sorites, and related issues. These are important, and we will have more to say about some of them, but we also seek to refocus the analysis of vagueness, moving away from consideration of abstract philosophical problems, and towards consideration of the problems faced by ordinary language users.
We thank the anonymous reviewer and participants of the vagueness workshop at the 17th Amsterdam Colloquium and at the CAuLD workshop at INRIA. Earlier versions of this paper offered a less tenable notion of vagueness. The reactions and feedback we received have helped us revise our definition as well as bringing clarity to the future direction of this work.
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Frazee, J., Beaver, D. (2010). Vagueness Is Rational under Uncertainty. In: Aloni, M., Bastiaanse, H., de Jager, T., Schulz, K. (eds) Logic, Language and Meaning. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 6042. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-14287-1_16
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