Vagueness vs Ambiguity vs Generality

An explanation of the difference between Vagueness, Ambiguity, and Generality, including some of the paradoxes that arise form issues of vagueness, and why the same problems don't arise with the other terms.

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Information for this video gathered from The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Collier-MacMillan Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the Dictionary of Continental Philosophy, and more! (#Vagueness #PhilosophyofLanguage)

[littlebigphil]

Vagueness is at the heart of so much of everyday conversation, that I feel it's a shame how little attention it gets. Often people talk past one another because they don't see the vagueness, and when a conversation is heated it's very easy to obstinately apply crisp logic where it doesn't belong.

[kinseywk]

Is vagueness synonymous with polysemy, then? Or is that reserved for situations that are definitively multi-entendre?

[Pfhorrest]

It seems like vague predicates are mostly really just fuzzy predicates, ones that admit of degrees of applicability between 0 and 1. So someone is wholly bald if they have no hair at all, and partially bald if they're missing some normally-present hair. That doesn't seem to solve the paradox of the heap though, because it's not clear what "wholly a heap" or "partially a heap" would mean; we would need to have some clear threshold for what constitutes the "1" end of the spectrum still, even if we allow for values between 0 and 1.

[DrGBhas]

Can vagueness be understood as a relationship of parts to a whole?

[havenbastion]

I don't know about the rest but the day you accidentally spell Nietzsche correctly is the day you're a True Philosopher... whatever "day" means.

[InventiveHarvest]

The meaning of terms is determined in the domain of discourse. The exact number of grains of sand on a beach is not important for what we usually mean when we say beach. If a pail of sand was removed from a beach, it would not lose any of its beachness. If the sand was still there, but we built a strip mall on it, it would lose its beachness. Often words have less to do with their physical properties than their intended usage.