Wittgenstein And The Problem Of Vagueness

Vagueness is a very hot problem in Anglo-American philosophy for the last forty years,and it is also a trans-disciplinary problem cross philosophy,linguistics,logic and cognitive science.It is firstly considered as a linguistic phenomenon,having borderline case as its essential characteristic.Thus ordinary language is one kind of vague language in terms of borderline case,because there is no sharp borderline between the cases which the words and expressions of ordinary language can apply to and the cases they cannot apply to.The problem of vagueness mainly involves the following aspects: the extension of the vagueness word does not have an exact boundary,the vagueness statement describing the boundary condition has no true value,and it also leads to the heap paradox(the well-known heap paradox and baldness paradox are Typical examples).Finally,the mystery of allegations of the relationship between vagueness language and the world will also arise.At present,the research on the problem of vagueness has gradually become a concern for many philosophers.Many interpretive theories about vagueness are formed,such as Three-Valued Logics,Fuzzy Logics,Supervaluationalism,Epistemicism,Contextualism,and so on.These theories compete with each other and criticize each other,but there is still no unified solution to the problem of vagueness.As an important philosopher who has made profound insights into the nature of language,Wittgenstein's ideas undoubtedly have positive implications for our understanding,clarification and resolution of vagueness.Early Wittgenstein followed Frege and Russell to pursue a clear and ideal language.In this ideal language,each word is well-defined and therefore has an accurate meaning.It does not produce heap paradox.According to Wittgenstein's early picture theory,this language also has an accurate logical structure and is in one-to-one correspondence with the structure of the world.In contrast to this clear ideal language,the vagueness of ordinary language manifests itself as a logical flaw that needs to be rejected.However,there are many problems with the interpretation of vagueness in earlier Wittgensteinian views.Ordinary vague language has its own meaning,and rejecting vagueness violates our intuition.Not only that,the pursuit of a clear and definite meaning of language actually makes the meaning of language out of our actual language practice and daily life,and the effectiveness of classical logic is also greatly limited.Later Wittgenstein reversed the early perception of language.He proposed the theory of "language-games" and "family resemblance" and opposed to interpreting the meaning of language merely as referring to things.Wittgenstein advocated the use of significance in the later period,stressing that language does not have a single,definite meaning,but that it has different usages in different uses of real activities,and then obtains different meanings.Later Wittgenstein returned to ordinary language and acknowledged the diversity and complexity of linguistic phenomena,and in fact acknowledged the universal existence and legitimacy of vagueness.According to Wittgenstein in the later period,the meaning of the vague language lies in its usage,and heap paradox can be solved in some way.However,Wittgenstein also had some difficulties in solving the problem of vagueness in the later period.The meaning of the vague phrase does not seem to be exactly equivalent to its usage,otherwise it will cause the truth value of the vague sentence to be undecidable and the part of the language describing the world function to be lost.This dissertation finally based on Wittgenstein's ideas in the later period,tried to put forward a possible Wittgenstein solution to the problem of vagueness.As Wittgenstein stated in his later thoughts,the problem of vagueness is indeed legal,and the existence of vagueness in the ubiquitous and ordinary language is possible,but in reality people will not go without endless steps are pursued endlessly,so heap paradox does not arise.We can know that there is a cut point in the heap paradox,but it can only be infinitely close but it cannot be found.In the heap paradox,the premise of each section is separated by itself,and its true value is positive.When all the chain pieces are connected in series,the whole premise is false.Therefore,in dealing with the problem of vagueness,we should distinguish the logical dimension from the realistic dimension,and ignore the desire to pursue precise truth values theoretically,and stop the inexhaustible extension in time."keep our arguments reasonably short." should always been maintained with.