Vagueness, Approximation, and Granularity (VAAG)

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Vagueness is a pervasive property of human language and cognition that is important for all fields of research that make use of symbolic representations. Approximation refers mechanisms that regulate vagueness in meaning composition, and granularity to mechanisms that divide meaning spaces. While vagueness has often been regarded as undesirable, the VAAG project is based on a growing recognition that vagueness is actually in many respects useful. VAAG targets a broad, interdisciplinary reassessment of vagueness with contributions to general cognitive science, linguistic semantics, experimental psychology, formal pragmatics and computer science. An appropriate theory of vagueness for these uses must not only explain how vagueness is represented, but also why it exists, what its uses are, and how it is constrained sentence internally and within discourse. Three central themes of the VAAG-project are the following: a) the relation of vagueness and cognitive efficiency, b) vagueness, granularity and the compositionality of meaning, and c) the distinction between different kinds of vagueness. The first theme addresses the question why vagueness is useful. We explore the intuition that vagueness can be useful in scenario where precise information can provide too much information. The second theme concerns approximation which regulates vagueness either through explicit markers like \emph{exactly} or as a general side-effect of concept combination. The third theme connects to both of the other themes since different motivation of vagueness seem to lead to types of vagueness, and these require different types of approximation strategies. In this way, the VAAG project targets a central issue for models of intelligent interaction using a broad multi-disciplinary perspective.