Synopses & Reviews
Our daily lives are full of vagueness or fuzziness. When we describe someone as "tall," for example, it is as though there is a particular height beyond which a person can be considered "tall." In this stimulating book, Kees Van Deemter cuts across various disciplines--including artificial intelligence, logic, and computer science--to illuminate the nature and importance of vagueness. Van Deemter shows why vagueness is both unavoidable and useful, and he demonstrates how tempting--and how wrong--it often is to think in terms of black and white, instead of the richly graded spectrum of the world around us. Vagueness, the author argues, allows us to focus on what matters, leaving out irrelevant details, and adding texture to what would otherwise be unintelligible facts. The embrace of vagueness, however, comes at a price, for when degrees of grey are accepted, concepts like truth, belief, and proof lose their power, and we are banished from that paradise in which truth and falsity are the only possibilities.
About the Author
Kees van Deemter is Reader in Computing Science at the University of Aberdeen.
Table of Contents
Prologue
Part 1: Vagueness, where one leasts expects it
1. Introduction: False Clarity
2. Sex and similarity: on the Fiction of Species
3. Measurements that Matter
4. Identity and Gradual Change
5. Vagueness in Numbers and Maths
Part II: Theories of Vagueness
6. The Linguistics of Vagueness
7. Reasoning with Vague Information
8. Parrying a Paradox
9. Degrees of Truth
Part III: Working Models of Vagueness
10. Artificial Intelligence
11. When to be Vague: Computers as Authors
12. The Expulsion from Boole's Paradise
Epilogue: In the Antiques Shop
Endnotes
Further Reading
Bibliography