Program


Igor Douven (Leuven)

Vagueness: a Conceptual Space Approach

(Joint work with L. Decock, R. Dietz, P. Egré)

A central question in the debate about vagueness is the question of what a borderline
case is. Answers to this question are commonly stated in terms of how
people respond to particular cases. In this paper, we aim at explaining why
people respond to borderline cases the way they do. Our proposal draws on recent
work in cognitive psychology, in particular on work on conceptual spaces.
We argue for two plausible extensions of this work and show how these help
to accommodate the phenomena related to vagueness in the conceptual spaces
approach. The result will be an explanation of people’s responses to borderline
cases in terms of how the human mind conceptualizes the world.