Abstract
Scholarship on borderline vagueness pinpoints Russell's 1923 essay titled “Vagueness” as the starting point for rigorous analysis. The importance of Russell's work over and above discussions of indeterminacy in antiquity and in the modern period is that Russell isolated borderline vagueness from indeterminacies that do not threaten classical logic. This paper argues that historical propriety concerning the analysis of borderline vagueness belongs to Peirce since he was the first to show that borderline vagueness is distinct from other forms of indeterminacy (e.g., generality, unspecificity, and uninformativeness) and that the application of vague predicates to borderline cases involves an intrinsic uncertainty.
About the author
David W. Agler (b. 1982) is a lecturer at the Pennsylvania State University 〈dwa132@psu.edu〉. His research interests include Peirce, philosophy of language, American philosophy, and philosophy of logic. His publications include “The UFAIL approach: Unconventional weapons and their ‘unintended’ effects” (2010); “Peirce's direct, non-reductive contextual theory of names” (2011); “Symbolic logic: Syntax, semantics, and proof” (2012); and “Polanyi and Peirce on the critical method” (2012).
©[2013] by Walter de Gruyter Berlin Boston
