H. P. Grice, "Fuzzy implicatures, and how to unfuzz them"

vagum: Some days, Grice did not feel ‘Grecian,’ and would use very vernacular expressions. He thought that what Cicero calls ‘vagum’ is best rendered in Oxfordshire dialect as ‘fuzzy.’ It is not clear which of Grice’s maxim controls this. The opposite of ‘vague’ is ‘specific.’ Grice was more concerned about this in the earlier lectures where he has under the desideratum of conversational candour and the principle of conversational benevolence, and the desideratum of conversational clarity that one should be explicit, and make one’s point explicit. But under the submaxims of the conversational category of modus (‘be perspicuous [sic]), none seem to prohibit ‘vagueness’ as such: Avoid obscurity of expression.Avoid ambiguity.Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity).Be orderly The one he later calls a ‘tailoring principle’ ‘frame your contribution in way that facilitates a reply’, the ‘vagueness’ avoidance seems implicit. Cf. fuzzy. The indeterminacy of the field of application of an expression, in contrast to precision. For instance, the expression “young man” is vague since the point at which its appropriate application to a person begins and ends cannot be precisely defined. Vagueness should be distinguished from ambiguity, by which a term has more than one meaning. The vagueness of an expression is due to a semantic feature of the term itself, rather than to the subjective condition of its user. Vagueness gives rise to borderline cases, and propositions with vague terms lack a definite truth-value. For this reason, Frege rejected the possibility of vague concepts, although they are tolerated in recent work in vague or fuzzy logic. Various paradoxes arise due to the vagueness of words, including the ancient sorites paradox. It is because of its intrinsic vagueness that some philosophers seek to replace ordinary language with an ideal language. But ordinary language philosophers hold that this proposal creates a false promise of eliminating vagueness. Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblance in part is a model of meaning that tolerates vagueness. As a property of expressions, vagueness extends to all sorts of cognitive representations. Some philosophers hold that there can be vagueness in things as well as in the representation of things. “A representation is vague when the relation of the representing system to the represented system is not one–one, but one–many.” Russell, Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, vol. IX. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Fuzzy impicatures, and how to unfuzz them.”