On Paradoxes Connected with the Vagueness of Concepts

• Authors: Krystyna Misiuna

Title variants

PL

O paradoksach zwiazanych z nieostrością pojęć

EN

On Paradoxes Connected with the Vagueness of Concepts

• Languages of publication: PL

Abstracts

PL

All empirical concepts belonging to natural language are vague. The vagueness of empirical discourse is a source of many semantical problems which have been known since ancient times. One of those problems concerns the so called sorites paradoxes. This article is an attempt to show that the paradoxes are either invalid or unsound inferences. Since classical logic is useless for semantical analysis of such inferences, the article makes use of the Belnap four-valued logic based on the bilattice FOUR. Belnap's logic is the base logic for defining a nonmonotonic consequence relation which prefers models with classical valuations among all valuations of the four-valued logic whenever it is possible. The approach outlined in this article is intuitive, and has more advantages than the supervaluational approach.

• Publisher: University of Warsaw, Institute of Philosophy
• Journal: Filozofia Nauki
• Year: 2009
• Volume: 17
• Issue: 4
• Pages: 5-10

Dates

published

2009-12-01

Contributors

author

Krystyna Misiuna