Explaining vague language

null, null, Paul Egré (École Normale Supérieure, Institut Jean Nicod), Benjamin Spector (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

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Abstract:

Why is language vague? Vagueness may be explained and rationalized if
it can be shown that vague language is more useful to speaker and
hearer than precise language. In a well-known paper, Bart Lipman
proposed a game-theoretic account of vagueness in terms of mixed
strategy that leads to a puzzle: vagueness cannot be strictly better
than precision at equilibrium. More recently, we have put forward a
Bayesian account of vagueness establishing that using vague words can
sometimes be strictly more informative than using precise words (Egré,
Spector, Mortier, Verheyen 2023). This paper proposes to compare both
results and to explain why they are not in contradiction. Lipman's
definition of vagueness relies exclusively on a property of signaling
strategies, without making any assumptions about the lexicon, whereas
our account involves a layer of semantic content. We argue that the
semantic account of vagueness is needed, and more adequate and
explanatory of vagueness.