The Contextualism Interpretation Of Vagueness

Beginning with Ancient Greek philosophy, under the lead of the linguistic turn, through the baptism of analytical philosophy and linguistics, vagueness has gradually become an important problem in modern linguistic philosophy. Reviewing the origin of vagueness, the first person raised this problem is Eubulides in ancient Greek, but it appeared in the forms of the heap paradox at that moment. Then people gradually induced someone as the heap paradox to the sorites paradox, the sorites paradox became one of problems of logic. In the end of 19 century, with the rise of modem logic, analytical philosophers, such as Russell, Frege ascribed the sorites paradox to vague phenomenon in language in the view of analytical philosophy, and they called it vagueness.The investigation of Vagueness isn't the privilege of linguistic philosophy. It was also the investigative object of other disciplines. Mathmatics, Computer science and Linguistics had deeply investigations, but these disciplines investigated vagueness on the application layer, without concerning the nature of this problem. In these areas,the solution was tools, not purpose. For example, Computer science was only attempt to solve fuzzy control in artifical intelligence by the study of vagueness. However, in philosophy aspect, philosopher standed on the abstract and macro level, applying logic, epistemology, contextualism to interprete this problem. Meanwhile, the investigation of Vagueness was deepened with the argument of these theories.This essay investigates vagueness deeply by using the method of context analysis. The essay composes mainly of three chapters. The first chapter is "The rise of contextualism interpretation of vagueness", this chapter states the origin, background and multi-angle interpretation of vagueness. Though arrangement, it clarifies the thread of the study of vagueness,expands the paper's train of thought. At the same time, this comparison makes us realize the inevitability and probability of contextual interpretation. The second chapter is the main content, expounding the special method of contextualism interpretation, i.e. giving the reasonable explanation by research application of vague predicates, construction of internal context and so on. It proves internal context playing important role to solve borderline cases. In the third chapter, we illustrate the meaning of this vision.