Literary Fuzziness: Lack Of Experience

Fuzziness is one of the inherent natures of natural languages, which has aroused people's attention for a long time. However, systematic study of fuzziness was not done until recently. In 1965, the American scientist, Lofti Zadeh put forward his influential paper fuzzy sets, which also provided a theoretical foundation for a systematic study of fuzzy linguistics. In recent years, there are a huge number of monographs and papers published concerning fuzzy linguistics, and more kinds of linguistic fuzziness are attracting people's attention. But most contributions are mainly descriptive studies. The study of the causes of fuzziness is an underdeveloped area. In most published works, more often than not, only a few lines are devoted to the causes of linguistic fuzziness. As far as literature is concerned, some linguists have turned to reader's response theory to account for literary fuzziness. Literary fuzziness is arbitrarily and hastily taken as authors' deliberate invention, which is apt to mislead readers. It is a weak point to neglect a serious exploration of the causes of literary fuzziness in the study of fuzzy linguistics, which is sure to be a big obstacle to the further development of fuzzy linguistics.So it is necessary to make a serious exploration of the causes of fuzziness. Cognitive studies, especially the dialectical materialist theory of knowledge, have provided people with a fresh angle of view and new ideas, which is of great help to the study of linguistic fuzziness as well.The originality of the present paper is to explore the causes of literary fuzziness by applying the dialectical materialist theory of knowledge. By applying the theory, the paper comes to the conclusion that literary fuzziness comes from readers' lack of the experience knowledge of the original author. So the present paper insists that literary fuzziness be properly handled. Since fuzziness is an inherent nature of all natural languages, translators should try to obtain fuzzy equivalence in translation. If the original fuzziness has to be clarified because of the difference between the target language and the source language, responsible translators will turn to the author's life experience to avoid wrong clarification of literary fuzziness that will surely mislead readers of the...