Vagueness: A Fifth Colun1n Approach
Crispin Wright · 2004
Abstract Anyone must agree that vagueness pervades the lexicon of natural languages: almost everything we say is expressed in vague vocabulary. It is a little more controversial, but presumably true, that this is unavoidable: that a language stripped of vague expressions would suffer not merely in point of usefulness— often a vague judgement is exactly what we need—but in its very expressive power. (We need concepts, for instance, of rough impressions, of casual appearances, and of circumstances in which a precise predicationsay, “is more than six feet tall”—may justifiably be made on the basis of rough—and— ready observation; and we need to be able to express these concepts.) 'This makes vagueness a topic of central philosophical significance in at least two ways. Both the philosophy of languagein so for as it is concerned with what it is, at the most general level, to have mastery of a natural language—and the metaphysics of the relationship between natural languages and the world they serve to represent must demand an understanding of the nature of vagueness.