【正文】 s cat also has a nictating membrane. Generality saves labor. When the girl says that she wants a toy rather than clothes, she narrows the range of acceptable gifts without going through the trouble of specifying a particular gift. The girl also balances values: a gift should be intrinsically desired and yet also be a surprise. ‘Vague’ has a sense which is synonymous with generality. This precipitates many equivocal explanations of vagueness. For instance, many mentators say that vagueness exists because broad categories ease the task of classification. If I can describe your sweater as red, then I do not need to figure out whether it is scarlet. This freedom to use vague expressions obviously helps us to learn, teach, municate, and remember.My last suggestion is that words are vague because we don’t know the strategies of other people. That is, when I use a word, I do not know all the possible situations where you would use my information and hence I might want to ‘hedge’ my bets and be vaguer. A very concrete example of this es from contract the guideline we follow in making out contracts. Instead of attempting to specify in exact terms what a party to the contract is supposed to do, contracts often use vague terms such as ‘taking appropriate care’ or ‘ with all due speed’. If agents fear that circumstances may arise that they currently cannot imagine, then they may wish to avoid being too precise in order to avoid being trapped later. Instead, they require the other party to respond to unexpected circumstances ‘a(chǎn)ppropriately’, relying on the hope that the meaning of this word will be sufficiently clear. This factor focuses on the relationship between vagueness and unforeseen contingencies. that would be truly vague, since there is no definite criterion for deciding what counts as `the near future39。 means.Some philosophers think that one obstacle to giving a clear account of vagueness is that `vagueness39。Deese’s argument is that vagueness is not a concept which applies to language, but to the ideas which language expresses. It is obviously difficult to separate out language from the ideas it expresses, but it seems that claiming that it is our ideas which are vague, rather than our language, is another way of attempting to make the analysis of language less plicated, by shifting the problem away from linguistics and into psychology. But the notion that the structure of ideas is vague in no way precludes the language system also incorporating vagueness. Vagueness is part of language.③ David Crystal amp。 That mountain is rather tablelike Linguisticswise she’s rather clever② Peirce, . Vague, in Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology (b) the language has no suitable exact word, or the speaker does not know it。Ullmann’s idea that it is language itself that leads to vagueness seems reasonable, but I think he confuses cause and effects. It is the world and people in it that are reflected by, and even necessitate the capacity of language to express vagueness. So, linguistic vagueness is not gratuitous – it is caused, like many other observed characteristics of language, by the world in which language is used. Peirce is often considered as the originator of the notion of vagueness in language, although Ullmann brings it forward rather earlier. Peirce was perhaps the first to try to formulate the notion in a rigorous way, as follows: A proposition is vague where there are possible states of things concerning which it is intrinsically uncertain whether, had they been contemplated by the speaker, he would have regarded as excluded or allowed by the proposition. By intrinsically uncertain we mean not uncertain in consequence of any ignorance of the interpreter, but because the speaker’s habits of language were indeterminate。 and Miss Bates and I, he is just the happy medium.” The above dialogue is extracted from Emma written by Jane Austen. While language is considered to be municating means people use every day, we can hardly ignore the fact that many of our utterances are relatively vague. Let’s consider, for example, the word ‘tall’. There is no precise, known height that defines the line between a person who is tall and a person who is not. Why do we use a language in which such words are so prevalent? Why don’t we simply adopt as a definition that ‘tall’ will mean above, say, 6foot2? We could even adopt a contextspecific definition, saying for example that ‘tall’ for a newborn means above 15 inches, while ‘tall’ for a professional basketball player means above 6foot10.If any word we use had to be given such a specific definition, there would be a great efficiency loss in munication. And it is obviously easier to municate when one is allowed to use vague language. Most speakers of English are not particularly aware of the frequent use of vague language (unless it is pointed out to them) and this fact is in itself of interest. It shows that vagueness in munication is part of our takenforgranted world, and that normally we do not notice it unless it appears inappropriate – for example, when someone seems to be deliberately withholding information. This makes vagueness like many other linguistic phenomena, which pass unnoticed until an investigating linguist argues that they are worthy of description. An example is metaphor, which appeared to be an esoteric issue until the publication of Metaphors We Live By (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). In that book, the authors point out that speakers often do not realize that the language they are using is metaphorical. Likewise, experts found out that people often do not realize that the language they are using is vague.There are many different standards regarding the use of language. Clarity and precision maybe are the most important. Hence, people generally believe that vagueness should be avoided. I would like to say that this is rather too simple a view, and likely to be positive