Explaining vague language
This addresses a theoretical puzzle in linguistics and philosophy of language about why vague language exists, but it is incremental as it reconciles existing models rather than introducing new ones.
The paper compares two game-theoretic and Bayesian accounts of vagueness in language, explaining why they are not contradictory and arguing that a semantic approach is more adequate for explaining vagueness.
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, Égré, Spector, Mortier and Verheyen have put forward a Bayesian account of vagueness establishing that using vague words can be strictly more informative than using precise words. 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 Égré et al.'s involves a layer of semantic content. We argue that the semantic account of vagueness is needed, and more adequate and explanatory of vagueness.