Pablo Cobreros and David Ripley. Non-classical Logics for Vague Predicates

Vague predicates are expressions such as “red”, “tall”, “heap” or “many”, whose meaning does not allow us to draw a fixed and determinate boundary between cases to which these expressions apply and cases to which they do not apply. The aim of this course is to give a systematic introduction to logics for vagueness and to recent advances on the semantic treatment of vague predicates. The focus of the lectures will be on non-classical logics for first-order languages and on the comparison between three main frameworks: partial two-valued logics (super- and sub-valuationism), three-valued logics (LP and K3), and similarity-based logics (tolerant and strict semantics). The main originality of the course will be the emphasis put on the duality between the main logics definable in each of these frameworks. Our ambition is to show systematic correspondences and differences between them, in particular concerning the ways in which they either preserve classical logic or depart from it. The last lecture will confront experimental evidence on vagueness (Ripley 2009, Alxatib and Pelletier 2010, Serchuk et al. 2010, Egré, Gardelle, Ripley, in progress) with each of the frameworks examined in the course.

Course webpage

Moodle site

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