Richard Dietz - Vagueness and Rationality in Language Use and Cognition

This series takes the current thinking on topics in linguistics from the theoretical level to validation through empirical and experimental research. The volumes published offer insights on research that combines linguistic perspectives from recently emerging experimental semantics and pragmatics as well as experimental syntax, phonology, and cross-linguistic psycholinguistics with cognitive science perspectives on linguistics, psychology, philosophy, artificial intelligence and neuroscience, and research into the mind, using all the various technical and critical methods available. The series also publishes cross-linguistic, cross-cultural studies that focus on finding variations and universals with cognitive validity. The peer reviewed edited volumes and monographs in this series inform the reader of the advances made through empirical and experimental research in the language-related cognitive science disciplines.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/13376

This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG

The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

The idea for this editorial project goes back to 2014 when I was invited to give a lecture series on vagueness at Seoul National University, where I met Chungmin Lee, the editor-in-chief of the Language, Cognition, and Mind (LCAM) series with Springer. One of the results of our discussions was Chungmins suggestion to contribute a volume on vagueness to the then just newly launched LCAM series. I put the idea aside at first, for lack of time. A couple of years later, I came back to the idea. By that time, it had become obvious to me that the fast-growing literature on vagueness and rationality deserves more attention. If there is something like a received view about vagueness as a theoretical issue, it seems to boil down to something that may be characterised in terms of formal logic only. Undoubtedly, this logical approach to vagueness has proven very productive in the last decades. But there is reason for doubt that there is no more of theoretical interest to vagueness than a logical puzzle. For one, the orthodox model of rational decision, expected utility theory, does not supply sufficient means of accommodating vagueness in utility and in credence adequately. There is a growing sense in decision theory that there is no straightforward fix to this limitation in a way that would do justice to empirical data. Insofar as decision theory is meant to provide a predictive model of real-world behaviour, it seems fair to say that this problem is not a minor one. For another, insofar as predictive models of behaviour are guided by the methodological presumption of rationality, the question arises how to square vagueness in preferences or beliefs with constraints on rational behaviour. In particular, the question of how vague language use may be explained as a kind of rational behaviour has received increasingly attention in the social sciences. It is my hope that this volume will make this cluster of related questions more visible on the map.

I would like to thank first and foremost Chungmin Lee for suggesting me editing this volume in the LCAM series and for giving me very helpful advice in this editorial project. Work on this project was made possible through a KAKENHI Grant-in-Aid (C) for Scientific Research (No. 16K02110) awarded by the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) and a Research Fellowship for Experienced Researchers awarded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. My thanks go to both awarding institutions. I am grateful to Dan Lassiter and an anonymous referee for their helpful reviews and to Nicole Standen-Mills for proofreading the whole volume. Finally, it has been a pleasure to work with Helen van der Stelt, Anita van der Linden-Rachmat and Ritu Chandwani.