The topic of vagueness re-emerged in the twentieth century from relative obscurity. It deals with the phenomenon in natural language that manifests itself in apparent semantic indeterminacy - the indeterminacy, for example, that arises when asked to draw the line between the tall and non-tall, or the drunk and the sober. An associated paradox emphasises the challenging nature of the phenomenon, presenting one of the most resilient paradoxes of logic. The apparent threat posed for orthodox theories of the semantics and logic of natural language has become the focus of intense philosophical scrutiny amongst philosophers and non-philosophers alike. Vagueness, Logic and Ontology explores various responses to the philosophical problems generated by vagueness and its associated paradox - the sorites paradox. Hyde argues that the theoretical space in which vagueness is sometimes ontologically grounded and modelled by a truth-functional logic affords a coherent response to the problems posed by vagueness. Showing how the concept of vagueness can be applied to the world, Hyde's ontological account proposes a substantial revision of orthodox semantics, metaphysics and logic. This book will be of particular interest to readers in philosophy, linguistics, cognitive science and geographic information systems.

The topic of vagueness re-emerged in the twentieth century from relative obscurity. It deals with the phenomenon in natural language that manifests itself in apparent semantic indeterminacy - the indeterminacy, for example, that arises when asked to draw the line between the tall and non-tall, or the drunk and the sober. An associated paradox emphasises the challenging nature of the phenomenon, presenting one of the most resilient paradoxes of logic. The apparent threat posed for orthodox theories of the semantics and logic of natural language has become the focus of intense philosophical scrutiny amongst philosophers and non-philosophers alike. Vagueness, Logic and Ontology explores various responses to the philosophical problems generated by vagueness and its associated paradox - the sorites paradox. Hyde argues that the theoretical space in which vagueness is sometimes ontologically grounded and modelled by a truth-functional logic affords a coherent response to the problems posed by vagueness. Showing how the concept of vagueness can be applied to the world, Hyde's ontological account proposes a substantial revision of orthodox semantics, metaphysics and logic. This book will be of particular interest to readers in philosophy, linguistics, cognitive science and geographic information systems.

This volume explores how vagueness matters as a specific problem in the context of theories that are primarily about something else. After an introductory chapter on the Sorites paradox, which exposes the various forms the paradox can take and some of the responses that have been pursued, the book proceeds with a chapter on vagueness and metaphysics, which covers important questions concerning vagueness that arise in connection with the deployment of certain key metaphysical notions. Subsequent chapters address the following: vagueness and logic, which discusses the sort of model theory that is suggested by the main, rival accounts of vagueness; vagueness and meaning, which focuses on contextualist, epistemicist, and indeterminist theories; vagueness and observationality; vagueness within linguistics, which focuses on approaches that take comparison classes into account; and the idea that vagueness in law is typically extravagant and that extravagant vagueness is a necessary feature of legal systems.

This book is based on two new nominalistic theses: first, that material things (houses, cats, people, symphonies, and also hair, milk, red, and love) are recurrent types, and second, that things are ontologically incomplete. Using these ideas, simple solutions are offered to a plethora of questions in ontology, philosophy of mind, and aesthetics.

" This volume contains the Proceedings of the Second Meeting Italian-American Philosophy, that took place in New York from 12 to 15 October 1999, together with two contributions given during the First Meeting. It is the first volume of a Yearbook for Philosophical Hermeneutics, The Dialogue, actually aiming to promote the dialogue between analytic and hermeneutic philosophy. Normativity and legitimacy are the two key concepts which have been at the base of the confrontation between the thought of the Frankfurt School and most of the American philosophy. They can offer the possibility for further discussions and developments within the fields of aesthetics, logic, and language philosophy, epistemology, ethics, philosophy of law and politics. They also represent the ground on which the two different aspects of contemporary philosophy, that one of hermeneutic dealing with historical legitimacy, and the one of analytics dealing with rational determination of norms, could together establish a productive dialogue. "

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th European Conference on Symbolic and Quantitative Approaches to Reasoning with Uncertainty, ECSQARU 2007. Coverage in the 78 revised full papers, presented together with three invited papers, includes Bayesian networks, graphical models, learning causal networks, planning, causality and independence, preference modeling and decision, argumentation systems, inconsistency handling, and uncertainty measures.

This book is an attempt to accumulate the researches on diverse inter disciplinary field of engineering and management using Fuzzy Inference System (FIS). The book is organized in seven sections with twenty two chapters, covering a wide range of applications. Section I, caters theoretical aspects of FIS in chapter one. Section II, dealing with FIS applications to management related problems and consisting three chapters. Section III, accumulates six chapters to commemorate FIS application to mechanical and industrial engineering problems. Section IV, elaborates FIS application to image processing and cognition problems encompassing four chapters. Section V, describes FIS application to various power system engineering problem in three chapters. Section VI highlights the FIS application to system modeling and control problems and constitutes three chapters. Section VII accommodates two chapters and presents FIS application to civil engineering problem.

The Argument of the “Tractatus” presents a single unified interpretation of the Tractatus based on Wittgenstein’s own view that the philosophy of logic is the real foundation of his philosophical system. It demonstrates that on this interpretation Wittgenstein’s views are far more visionary and relevant to contemporary discussions than has been suspected. A case in point is a new interpretation of Wittgenstein’s theory of meaning that is shown to illuminate the views of a series of philosophers, including Brentano, the early Russell, Chomsky, Fodor, Katz, Kripke, Malcolm, and Dummett. McDonough’s interpretation sheds new light on the connection between Wittgenstein’s work and the nineteenth- and twentieth-century German philosophical tradition, and it facilitates a clear resolution of the controversy over the relation between Wittgenstein’s own early and later philosophies. The Argument of the “Tractatus” is an excellent introduction to the field of twentieth-century analytical philosophy. It treats a wide range of authors and topics, including the foundations of logic, the theory of meaning, the disputes concerning atomistic versus holistic conceptions of language, the nature of the mental, the foundations of psycho-linguistics, the theory of communication, and the nature of philosophical systems.

This book presents the state of the art in the fields of formal logic pioneered by Graham Priest. It includes advanced technical work on the model and proof theories of paraconsistent logic, in contributions from top scholars in the field. Graham Priest’s research has had a considerable influence on the field of philosophical logic, especially with respect to the themes of dialetheism—the thesis that there exist true but inconsistent sentences—and paraconsistency—an account of deduction in which contradictory premises do not entail the truth of arbitrary sentences. Priest’s work has regularly challenged researchers to reappraise many assumptions about rationality, ontology, and truth. This book collects original research by some of the most esteemed scholars working in philosophical logic, whose contributions explore and appraise Priest’s work on logical approaches to problems in philosophy, linguistics, computation, and mathematics. They provide fresh analyses, critiques, and applications of Priest’s work and attest to its continued relevance and topicality. The book also includes Priest’s responses to the contributors, providing a further layer to the development of these themes .

Vagueness is currently the subject of vigorous debate in the philosophy of logic and language. Vague terms-such as "tall", "red", "bald", and "tadpole" -- have borderline cases (arguably, someone may be neither tall nor not tall); and they lack well-defined extensions (there is no sharp boundary between tall people and the rest). The phenomenon of vagueness poses a fundamental challenge to classical logic and semantics, which assumes that propositions are either true or false and that extensions are determinate. Another striking problem to which vagueness gives rise is the sorites paradox. If you remove one grain from a heap of sand, surely you must be left with a heap. Yet apply this principle repeatedly as you remove grains one by one, and you end up, absurdly, with a solitary grain that counts as a heap. This anthology collects papers in the field. After an introduction that surveys the field, the essays form four groups, starting with some historically notable pieces. The 1970s saw an explosion of interest in vagueness, and the second group of essays reprints classic papers from this period. The following group of papers represent current work on the logic and semantics of vagueness. The essays in the final group are contributions to the continuing debate about vague objects and vague identity.