Vagueness, uncertainty and degrees of clarity

The focus of the paper is on the logic of clarity and the problem of higherorder vagueness. We first examine the consequences of the notion of intransitivity of indiscriminability for higher-order vagueness, and compare different theories of vagueness understood as inexact or imprecise knowledge, namely Williamson’s margin for error semantics, Halpern’s twodimensional semantics, and the system we call centered semantics. We then propose a semantics of degrees of clarity, inspired from the signal detection theory model, and outline a view of higher-order vagueness in which the notions of subjective clarity and unclarity are handled asymmetrically at higher orders, namely such that the clarity of clarity is compatible with the unclarity of unclarity. 1 Intransitivity and introspection One central and debated aspect of the notion of inexact knowledge concerns the non-transitivity of the relation of indiscriminability and how it should be represented. On the epistemic account of vagu...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: SYNTHESE
• Authors: Paul Égré, Denis Bonnay
• Keywords: Error Semantics, Inexact Knowledge, Semantics, SYNTHESE 2010