Vagueness

Suppose there is a heap of rice sitting in front of you. If you remove a single grain of rice from this heap, you surely still have a heap of rice; if ye remove a grain again, then ye still have a heap. But if you remove gains one by one and apply the previous principle at each stage, you will end up concluding that the final grain is also a heap of rice. Vague predicates such as "heap" and "tall" give rise to so-called "Sorites Paradox". In this class, we will survey some of the most prominent theories on vagueness and Sorites Paradox: many-valued logic, supervaluation and subvaluation, nihilism, epistemicism, and contextualism. In addition, we will also examine some of the empirical work on vagueness.