Vagueness

If you keep removing single grains of sand from a heap, when is it no longer a heap? From discussions of the heap paradox in classical Greece, to modern formal approaches like fuzzy logic, Timothy Williamson traces the history of the problem of vagueness. He argues that standard logic and formal semantics apply even to vague languages and defends the controversial, realist view that vagueness is a form of ignorance - there really is a grain of sand whose removal turns a heap into a non-heap, but we can never know exactly which one it is. Preface Introduction 1. The Early History of Sorites Paradoxes 2. The Ideal of Precision 3. The Rehabilitation of Vagueness 4. Many-Valued Logic and Degrees of Truth 5. Supervaluations 6. Nihilism 7. Vagueness as Ignorance 8. Inexact Knowledge 9. Vagueness in the World Appendix: The Logic of Clarity Notes Bibliography Index