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Not Exactly

In Praise of Vagueness

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Hailed as "amusing, persuasive, conversational, and engaging" (<em>Times Higher Education Supplement</em>), this stimulating volume cuts across various disciplines--including artificial intelligence, logic, and computer science--to illuminate the nature and importance of vagueness. Indeed, our daily lives are full of vagueness or fuzziness. We say someone is "tall," for example, but when <em>exactly</em> do we become tall--Five eleven? Six foot? Six one? Kees 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 loose their power, and we are banished from that paradise in which truth and falsity are the only possibilities.

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Not Exactly, van Deemter

Lingua
Pubblicato
2012
Rilegatura
(In brossura)
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Metodi di pagamento

Titolo
Not Exactly
Sottotitolo
In Praise of Vagueness
Lingua
Inglese
Pubblicato
2012
Formato
In brossura
Pagine
358
ISBN10
0199645736
ISBN13
9780199645732
Serie
Descrizione
Hailed as "amusing, persuasive, conversational, and engaging" (<em>Times Higher Education Supplement</em>), this stimulating volume cuts across various disciplines--including artificial intelligence, logic, and computer science--to illuminate the nature and importance of vagueness. Indeed, our daily lives are full of vagueness or fuzziness. We say someone is "tall," for example, but when <em>exactly</em> do we become tall--Five eleven? Six foot? Six one? Kees 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 loose their power, and we are banished from that paradise in which truth and falsity are the only possibilities.