Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

When I say “the theater is packed tonight” or “there are a lot of people in the theater tonight,” my utterance leaves a certain amount of uncertainty about the actual number of people in the theater. The same uncertainty about actual number is usually present when I say “the theater is full tonight” (even if the number of seats in the theater is known) or “there are 1000 people in the theater tonight.” There is a difference between the two sets of utterances, however: the latter can be understood in a way that is fully precise, but the former cannot be so understood (Pinkal 1985). This distinction — the possibility of a “natural precisification” (to use Pinkal's term) — is one of several empirical properties that distinguish vague terms like 'packed' and 'a lot' from (potentially) imprecise ones like 'full' and '1000'; the central theoretical question is whether the empirical differences between vagueness and imprecision can be explained within a framework that models these two kinds of interpretive uncertainty in the same way, by effectively building imprecision into the semantics (as in Kamp 1975 and much subsequent work), or whether they reflect a more fundamental distinction between them. The goal of this talk is to argue for the latter view, using both linguistic and experimental data, and to try to say what this distinction is. Specifically, I will suggest that vagueness is a matter of semantics, arising from aspects of the meanings of certain kinds of terms, while imprecision is a matter of pragmatics, reflecting the way that certain kinds of terms get used.