Abstract
Bonini et al. [2] present psychological data that they take to support an ‘epistemic’ account of how vague predicates are used in natural language. We argue that their data more strongly supports a ‘gap’ theory of vagueness, and that their arguments against gap theories are flawed. Additionally, we present more experimental evidence that supports gap theories, and argue for a semantic/pragmatic alternative that unifies super- and subvaluationary approaches to vagueness.
We thank Paul Egré, James Hampton, David Ripley, Robert van Rooij, Phil Serchuk, the organizers and audience at the ESSLLI 2009 Vagueness and Communication worshop and the ENS Vagueness and Similarity workshop, and the two anonymous reviewers for their help and insightful input. Many further issues that have not been fully discussed in this paper are detailed in Alxatib and Pelletier (forthcoming) [1]. The research for this project was partially funded by F. J. Pelletier’s NSERC grant #5525.
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Alxatib, S., Pelletier, J. (2011). On the Psychology of Truth-Gaps. 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_2
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