Cover Page -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Preface -- Contents -- List of Figures -- Prologue -- 1. Introduction: False Clarity -- Vagueness -- Paradox -- Academic perspectives on vagueness -- Part I : Vagueness, Where One Least Expects It -- 2. Sex and Similarity: On the Fiction of Species -- What is a species? -- The Ensatina salamander -- Lessons learned -- 3. Measurements that Matter -- A short history of the metre -- Obesity -- Poverty -- Intelligence -- Dialogue intermezzo: After the job interviews -- Scientific discovery and word meaning -- 4. Identity and Gradual Change -- Identity: The case of Old Number One -- Multiplying objects -- Dialogue intermezzo: On Old Number One -- What makes a book? -- What makes a person? -- What is a language? -- Digression: Protection against change -- So what? -- 5. Vagueness in Numbers and Maths -- Vagueness in mathematics -- Talking about numbers -- Which computer program is fastest? -- Statistical significance -- Part II : Theories of Vagueness -- 6. The Linguistics of Vagueness -- Chomsky's machine: Computing grammaticality -- Montague's machine: Computing meaning -- The role of language corpora -- Vague adjectives -- The meaning of adjectives -- Vagueness and ambiguity -- Lack of specificity -- Prototypes -- Comparatives -- Packaging what we say: Hedging -- Future work -- 7. Reasoning with Vague Information -- Reasoning with vague concepts -- The sorites paradox -- Vagueness as ignorance -- Similarity is in the eye of the beholder: The case of colour -- Dialogue intermezzo: On vagueness as ignorance -- Continuity and vagueness -- 8. Parrying a Paradox -- Logic and paradox -- A crash course in classical logic -- First deviation: Supervaluations and partial logic -- Second deviation: Context-aware reasoning -- Third deviation: Introspective agents -- 9. Degrees of Truth -- Fuzzy logic.

Dialogue intermezzo: On fuzzy logic -- Fuzzy logic and the sorites paradox -- Probabilistic versions of many-valued logic -- What's wrong with degrees? -- Part III : Working Models of Vagueness -- 10. Artificial Intelligence -- A brief history of AI -- Artificial intelligence? -- Qualitative reasoning -- Applying fuzzy logic: An artificial doctor -- The future of AI -- 11. When to be Vague: Computers as Authors -- Example: Generating vague descriptions -- Dialogue intermezzo: What use is a theory? -- Tolerance revisited -- A game theory perspective -- Vagueness in the absence of conflict -- Why do we speak? -- 12. The Expulsion from Boole's Paradise -- Earlier questions revisited -- Coping with vagueness -- Epilogue: Guaranteed Correct -- Notes -- Recommended Reading -- References -- Index.