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| List of Figures | |
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| Prologue | |
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| Introduction: False Clarity | |
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| Vagueness | |
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| Paradox | |
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| Academic perspectives on vagueness | |
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| Vagueness, Where One Least Expects It | |
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| Sex and Similarity: On the Fiction of Species | |
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| What is a species? | |
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| The Ensatina salamander | |
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| Lessons learned | |
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| Measurements that Matter | |
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| A short history of the metre | |
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| Obesity | |
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| Poverty | |
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| Intelligence | |
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| Dialogue intermezzo: After the job interviews | |
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| Scientific discovery and word meaning | |
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| Identity and Gradual Change | |
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| Identity: The case of Old Number One | |
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| Multiplying objects | |
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| Dialogue intermezzo: On Old Number One | |
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| What makes a book? | |
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| What makes a person? | |
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| What is a language? | |
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| Digression: Protection against change | |
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| So what? | |
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| Vagueness in Numbers and Maths | |
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| Vagueness in mathematics | |
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| Talking about numbers | |
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| Which computer program is fastest? | |
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| Statistical significance | |
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| Theories of Vagueness | |
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| The Linguistics of Vagueness | |
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| Chomsky's machine: Computing grammaticality | |
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| Montague's machine: Computing meaning | |
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| The role of language corpora | |
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| Vague adjectives | |
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| The meaning of adjectives | |
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| Vagueness and ambiguity | |
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| Lack of specificity | |
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| Prototypes | |
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| Comparatives | |
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| Packaging what we say: Hedging | |
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| Future work | |
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| Reasoning with Vague Information | |
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| Reasoning with vague concepts | |
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| The sorites paradox | |
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| Vagueness as ignorance | |
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| Similarity is in the eye of the beholder: The case of colour | |
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| Dialogue intermezzo: On vagueness as ignorance | |
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| Continuity and vagueness | |
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| Parrying a Paradox | |
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| Logic and paradox | |
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| A crash course in classical logic | |
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| First deviation: Supervaluations and partial logic | |
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| Second deviation: Context-aware reasoning | |
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| Third deviation: Introspective agents | |
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| Degrees of Truth | |
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| Fuzzy logic | |
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| Dialogue intermezzo: On fuzzy logic | |
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| Fuzzy logic and the sorites paradox | |
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| Probabilistic versions of many-valued logic | |
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| What's wrong with degrees? | |
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| Working Models of Vagueness | |
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| Artificial Intelligence | |
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| A brief history of AI | |
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| Artificial intelligence? | |
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| Qualitative reasoning | |
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| Applying fuzzy logic: An artificial doctor | |
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| The future of AI | |
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| When to be Vague: Computers as Authors | |
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| Example: Generating vague descriptions | |
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| Dialogue intermezzo: What use is a theory? | |
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| Tolerance revisited | |
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| A game theory perspective | |
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| Vagueness in the absence of conflict | |
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| Why do we speak? | |
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| The Expulsion from Boole's Paradise | |
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| Earlier questions revisited | |
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| Coping with vagueness | |
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| Epilogue: Guaranteed Correct | |
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| Notes | |
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| Recommended Reading | |
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| References | |
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| Index | |