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Contradictions at the Borders

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Book cover Vagueness in Communication (VIC 2009)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 6517))

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The purpose of this essay is to shed some light on a certain type of sentence, which I call a borderline contradiction. A borderline contradiction is a sentence of the form Fa ∧¬Fa, for some vague predicate F and some borderline case a of F, or a sentence equivalent to such a sentence. For example, if Jackie is a borderline case of ‘rich’, then ‘Jackie is rich and Jackie isn’t rich’ is a borderline contradiction. Many theories of vague language have entailments about borderline contradictions; correctly describing the behavior of borderline contradictions is one of the many tasks facing anyone offering a theory of vague language.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institut Jean Nicod, DEC-ENS, France

    David Ripley

Authors
  1. David Ripley
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Utrecht Institute for Linguistics OTS, Utrecht University, Janskerkhof 13a, 3512, Utrecht, BL, The Netherlands

    Rick Nouwen

  2. Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC), University of Amsterdam, Oude Turfmarkt 141-147, 1012, Amsterdam, GC, The Netherlands

    Robert van Rooij

  3. Zentrum für allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Schützenstraße 18, 10117, Berlin, Germany

    Uli Sauerland

  4. Fraunhofer FIT, Schloss Birlinghoven, 53757, Sankt Augustin, Germany

    Hans-Christian Schmitz

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Ripley, D. (2011). Contradictions at the Borders. In: Nouwen, R., van Rooij, R., Sauerland, U., Schmitz, HC. (eds) Vagueness in Communication. VIC 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6517. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-18446-8_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-18446-8_10

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-18445-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-18446-8

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