Program


Peter Gärdenfors (Lund)

Why Language has to be vague

The starting-point is an an account of semantics that is not construed as a mapping of language to the world, but mapping between individual meaning spaces. The meanings of linguistic entities are established via a “meeting of minds.” The concepts in the minds of communicating individuals are modeled as convex regions in conceptual spaces. However, since the continuous spaces of individuals is mediated in linguistic communication by discrete elements (or combinations fo such), the mapping between spaces will be an approximation. I will analyse the consequences of this view on semantics for the notion of vagueness.