One of the design
features of language is semanticity, “the property requiring that all signals
in a communication system have a meaning or a function” (Ohio State University,
2011: 17). While vague words and phrases do not violate this property, they
nonetheless present it with some challenges. Given any vague expression, we tend to take it for granted that we understand its meaning, but what this meaning consists of can be hard to describe, and where exactly this meaning is located can be hard to pin down. In this blog post, I will
introduce the concept of vagueness, explain why it poses such a problem for
semantics, and discuss how linguists, philosophers, and game theorists have attempted
to grapple with it.
I. What is vagueness?
First, what is
vagueness? An expression is vague if it admits of borderline cases that blur
the boundaries between one or more categories. Often, vagueness is defined in
terms of what it is not: precision. As Lipman (2009) puts it, “a word is precise if
it describes a well-defined set of objects. By contrast, a word is vague if
it is not precise.”
Vagueness is ubiquitous
in human speech, but much of the literature has focused on gradable adjectives
and adverbs. Gradable adjectives are those that can vary in intensity or
degree. Tall is one such adjective: Someone can be “very
tall”, “tall,” “somewhat tall,” etc. Dead, on the other hand, would
not be a gradable adjective: Someone cannot be “very dead” or “somewhat dead” –
either you’re dead or you’re not! (For more on gradable adjectives and adverbs,
please see: http://bit.ly/1D3nW8n)
Vagueness can also be
seen in approximate adverbs, such as almost, around, about,
approximately, hardly, and merely. Some linguists would
include in this list at least and at most (Wierzbicka,
1986). What is interesting about these latter two expressions is that they seem
precise, in the sense that they can be precisely defined in first-order logic.
However, their precision seems to evaporate once we try to locate their meanings.
For example, “at least
X” can be written as “it is not less than X” in precise first-order logic. But
in real-life situations, it can be difficult to pinpoint precisely what number
“at least X” refers to. Suppose your friend tells you, “At least 10 people are
coming to the party tonight.” You know that literally and logically s/he means,
“The number of people at the party will be somewhere from 10 to infinity”, but
psychologically you would assume s/he does not actually mean infinity but
rather some upper bound close to 10. Now, what exactly is the range of
acceptable upper bounds for “at least 10”? This is where the precision ends and
the vagueness begins. Would you be surprised if 12 people showed up to the
party? Probably not. What about if 20 people did? 50 people? 100 people? 1,000
people? At some high enough number, you’ll start to be surprised – but where
exactly this number lies, is hard to pin down.
II. Why is vagueness such a problem for semantics?
Truth-conditional
semantics assumes that the meaning of a word, phrase, or sentence lies in the
conditions that make it true. Vague expressions, however, do not have fixed
conditions that make them true (van Rooij, 2011). Intuitively, someone can be
“tall” in one setting but not in another: A 3’ baby is tall, but a 3’
basketball player is not.
This lack of fixed truth
conditions gives rise to the famous Sorites paradox: If “This man is tall” is
true for an 8’ man, then it seems fine to say it is also true for a 7’11” man.
By the same reasoning, it would seem fine to say it for a 7’10” man, 7’9” man,
and so on. But this leads to the absurd conclusion that “This man is tall” is
true for a 0.000001” man. A temporal variation of the paradox is: If it’s
“almost Christmas” on the 24th of December, then it should be
“almost Christmas” on the 23rd, and so on. But this leads to the
conclusion that it is “almost Christmas” on Thanksgiving, then on Easter, then
during the Big Bang – ridiculous!
III. What have theorists been doing about vagueness?
Some linguists and
philosophers have attempted to explain vagueness using a three-valued logic that
partitions truth values into “clearly true,” “clearly false,” and “borderline
true/false.” But this has come under fire by those who note that it still
maintains precise rather than vague boundaries between partitions. Some have
attempted to get around this by proposing a multi-valued “fuzzy” logic with
graded truth values. Still others have proposed modeling vagueness in terms of
probabilistic belief spaces (Lassiter, 2011).
Other theorists are less
concerned with truth and more intrigued by how vagueness could have arisen in
the first place. Using a game-theoretic framework, Lipman (2009) argues that
vague expressions are inefficient and therefore irrational. According to him,
any vague expression can be replaced with a more precise expression that is
less costly to produce. Among gradable adjectives, “John is tall”, for example,
could be replaced with “John is 6’11””. And among approximate adverbs,
“Stanford almost lost the game”, for example, could be replaced with “Stanford
won.” If vagueness is so inefficient and costly, how come it still remains in
language systems even after years of evolution? One theory is that such an
inefficient phenomenon has remained as a “side effect” of efficient speech acts that evolution has favored (O’Connor, 2013).
Contra Lipman’s claim
about the inefficiency of vague language, other game theorists have argued that
vague expressions can actually be advantageous in situations in which two people have
conflicting interests. In such situations, it is in each person’s best interest
to use vague language as a way to shade his/her beliefs, desires, and
intentions. However, this does not account for the fact that vague language in
real life arises not only between people with conflicting interests but also
between people with non-conflicting interests.
IV. Questions
Is vagueness always so inefficient? If so, why hasn't evolution wiped it out by now? If not, in what scenarios or under what circumstances would vagueness be more advantageous than being precise?
Have you come across any
funny, paradoxical, or otherwise memorable examples of vagueness in your life?
Can you think of any instances of vagueness that do not fit the types I
mentioned (i.e. gradable adjectives and adverbs, approximate adverbs)?
I disagree with the notion that truthfulness functions as a binary condition in “vague” statements. I think that, when indefinite ranges are provided, e.g., “we expect over 10 people at the party”, it’s intuitive that both the speaker and the listener have moderately congruent expectations for what those ranges entail. In the case of expecting over 10 people at a party, it’s socially/culturally established that the speaker expects over ten but less than some upper bound, perhaps twenty or thirty. Similarly, in the Sorites paradox presented by the Marianne, it feels very intuitive that a man that is 7’9 is less tall than a man that is 8’, and at a certain height based on context and norms, e.g., the country in which this statement is made, a man could be barely described as tall, until a grey threshold is passed at which a man could not be reasonably called tall. Trying to fit language into a coherent sense of truth values, whether discrete or graded, seems to imply that humans think and act rationally in the first place, which psychology suggests is very far from the case.
ReplyDeleteVagueness can be inefficient when people ascribe different meanings to approximate adverbs. I become annoyed when my friends text me that they are “almost there” when referring to a pre-determined meeting place. In my mind, an “almost there” should take them no longer than five minutes to arrive to the agreed meeting place. What irks me is when they nonchalantly arrive twenty minutes later not thinking that their tardiness is a problem and worthy of the adverb “almost.” The vagueness in this situation is centered on people’s different definitions or measurements of approximate adverbs like “almost,” which makes it difficult to communicate about things that cannot be accurately estimated, such as arrival time.
ReplyDeleteVagueness can also be used advantageously. I admit to employing vagueness in my diction when avoiding to volunteer some piece of information. For example, in high school, when my parents asked me if I had finished a paper or project, I would hesitantly say I was “almost” done in order to allay their fears without letting them know that I had just started the assignment. In this case, I used the wide range of “almost” to my advantage.
I agree that vagueness can be both efficient and inefficient – both advantageous and disadvantageous. I think one example of how vagueness can be advantageous occurs in poetry (or really just creative writing in general). I think it is in large part because language can be vague that it is possible to have poems (or songs, or novels, or even spoken utterances as well) that convey new meaning – and that it is possible to debate what that meaning is. If language were 100% precise – that is, if vagueness were not an integral characteristic of language – than there would be drastically fewer meanings that could possibly be communicated; the frequency of misinterpretation would likely be reduced, but so would the frequency of spontaneous communication of truly new ideas.
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