| Merleau-Ponty, M. (2014). Phenomenology of perception. D. A. Landes, Trans. New York: Routledge. (Original work published 1945). |
 
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| Last edited by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard 08/01/2024, 07:05 |
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| Discussing the phnomenon of the body and the phenomenon of the thing in an extended discussion of size and distance in the experience of reality: "if we want to describe these two phenomena, then we must say that my experience opens onto things and transcends itself in them because it always accomplishes itself within the framework of a certain arrangement with regard to the world that is the definition of my body. Sizes and forms only serve to "modalize" this overall hold upon the world. The thing is large if my gaze cannot encompass it, small if it does so easily, and medium sizes are distinguished from each other insofar as they, at an equal distance, more or less widen my gaze, or insofar as they, at unequal distances, widen it equally." |
| Sorensen, R. (1997-2018). Vagueness. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved October 27, 2021, from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/vagueness/. |
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| Last edited by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard 18/11/2021, 11:56 |
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| "Vagueness is standardly defined as the possession of borderline cases. For example, ‘tall’ is vague because a man who is 1.8 meters in height is neither clearly tall nor clearly non-tall. No amount of conceptual analysis or empirical investigation can settle whether a 1.8 meter man is tall. Borderline cases are inquiry resistant. . . . Inquiry resistance typically recurses. For, in addition to the unclarity of the borderline case, there is normally unclarity as to where the unclarity begins. . . . Consequently, ‘borderline case’ has borderline cases. This higher order vagueness seems to show that ‘vague’ is vague." |
"Every natural language is both vague and ambiguous. However, both features seem eliminable. Indeed, both are eliminated in miniature languages such as checkers notation, computer programming languages, and mathematical descriptions. Moreover, it seems that both vagueness and ambiguity ought to be minimized. ‘Vague’ and ‘ambiguous’ are pejorative terms. And they deserve their bad reputations. Think of all the automotive misery that has been prefaced by
Driver: Do I turn left?
Passenger: Right.
English can be lethal. Philosophers have long motivated appeals for an ideal language by pointing out how ambiguity creates the menace of equivocation:
No child should work.
Every person is a child of someone.
Therefore, no one should work.
Happily, we know how to criticize and correct all equivocations. Indeed, every natural language is self-disambiguating in the sense that each has all the resources needed to uniquely specify any reading one desires. Ambiguity is often the cause but rarely the object of philosophical rumination." |
| Wells, H. G. (1908). First and last things: A confession of faith and a rule of life. G.P. Putnam's Sons. |
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| Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard 06/10/2017, 12:40 |
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| "...as you look at finer and subtler things, as you leave the practical purpose for which the method exists, the element of error increases. Every species is vague, every term goes cloudy at its edges; and so in my way of thinking, relentless logic is only another name for a stupidity—for a sort of intellectual pigheadedness. If you push a philosophical or metaphysical inquiry through a series of valid syllogisms—never committing any generally recognised fallacy—you nevertheless leave behind you at each step a certain rubbing and marginal loss of objective truth, and you get deflections that are difficult to trace at each phase in the process. Every species waggles about in its definition, every tool is a little loose in its handle, every scale has its individual error." |
| Wilson, A. Aesthesis and perceptronium: On the entanglement of sensation, cognition, and matter. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. |
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| Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard 18/11/2021, 12:12 |
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| Think of film and its discrete images melding into a continuous stream. Paraphrasing Leibniz and his ideas of the confused-distinct spectrum of knowledge (as opposed to the obscure-clear spectrum):
"It is the indistinction that produces the image we see as we experience a film. Thus, the property of confusion is essential to the experience itself; the distinct images, those little perceptions, need to synthesize and integrate into a unified perception in order for that experience to occur. Thus, the experience is instrincsically indistinct, because in order to be that experience, it must maintain its characteristic synthetic unity, which depends on the confusion of its parts" (22).
"An indistinct perception is therefore, in some sense, real: it exists independently of the agent's capacities in the specific sense that no effort of cognition will render it distinct without changing the character of the perception in question. . . . Those aspects of the world that escape the countability of individuality reveal the aesthetic underpinnings of individuality" (23). |
| "The pre-Socratics, notably Parmenides, founded philosophy as an exercise in the mistrust of experience. The history of knowledge reads as a progressive questioning of previous assumptions about reality. From the depths of our organismic origins, evolution committed us to an unexamined naïve realism: as organism, we have to believe that this event follows that one; we have to trace effects to their causes in order to survive for any length of time in the environment, in order to escape our predators and obtains means of sustenance. But the philosophical attitude and the scientific reason that is its extension derive from a critique of these evolutionarily conditioned assumptions about reality." |
| "Knowledge has revealed itself to be formally irreducible to the simple events of empirical experience: from within the proposition, we cannot reach the outside to which it would seem to refer, but go infinitely from sign to sign, belief to belief, proposition to proposition." |
