On Vagueness
摘要
There are many words like the words tall, beautiful, fat, etc., that have one thing in common: They do not convey a precisely defined meaning. I am sure the reader will agree with me that there is no general consensus on who is a tall person, who is a beautiful person, etc. Let me give an example to make things more clear. Consider a person whose height is 170 cm (5ft 6in). Is this a tall person? If the person is a male, we are not really sure; but if the person is a female, then it is definitely a tall person, particularly if she is from some Mediterranean country. On the other hand, although we have learned that the opposite of, say, beautiful is ugly, still this is not really true: There are millions of people out there that are not beautiful but they are not ugly either. They are just ordinary people like me.