Explaining vague language

arXiv:2404.18154v1 Announce Type: new
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, Lipman proposes 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, \'Egr\'e, Spector, Mortier and Verheyen have put forward a Bayesian account of vagueness establishing that …

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