Not Exactly: In Praise of Vagueness

This is a particularly well written introduction to a certain part of the philosophical literature on vagueness. The author refutes the idea that vagueness is a fault and presents a certain number of different approaches to the problem explaining the advantages and disadvantages of each. You can read this book in bits. I have training in formal logic, so my view is perhaps a little biased, but all in all I have rarely seen a book by a philosopher in which the author bends over backwards trying to explain subtle concepts and succeeds like this one. My only niggle is the chapter on Artificial Intelligence which in my opinion spends just a little too much time (for my liking) introducing the subject before getting into the approaches to vagueness. I was expecting to see Dempster-Shafer theory discussed and didn't find it. Not only will you read about vagueness, but you should be better prepared to read works on analytic philosophy, in particular a good crash course on formal logic is given, but I'm not the best judge as to how clear that is, as I know much of that. I'm also glad to see he talks about the work of the great Hans Kamp who does very original and useful work in logic. This is a fun book on a subject which is disquieting. It might well challenge some of your basic views on reasoning. I have a good friend to whom I read parts of this over the phone, it's that well written. It's interesting that the author is not just a philosopher by training but also works in a computer science department of a university. This might explain why the book is clear: he has a goal of making software deal with vagueness.