Abstract
The idea that temporal propositions are vague predicates is examined with attention to the nature of the objects over which the predicates range. These objects should not, it is argued, be identified once and for all with points or intervals in the real line (or any fixed linear order). Context has an important role to play not only in sidestepping the Sorites paradox (Gaifman 2002) but also in shaping temporal moments/ extent (Landman 1991). The Russell-Wiener construction of time from events (Kamp 1979) is related to a notion of context given by a string of observations, the vagueness in which is brought out by grounding the observations in the real line. With this notion of context, the context dependency functions in Gaifman 2002 are adapted to interpret temporal propositions.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Allen, J.F.: Maintaining knowledge about temporal intervals. Communications of the ACM 26(11), 832–843 (1983)
Allen, J.F., Ferguson, G.: Actions and events in interval temporal logic. Journal of Logic and Computation 4(5), 531–579 (1994)
Fernando, T.: Situations in LTL as strings. Information and Computation 207(10), 980–999 (2009a)
Fernando, T.: Situations as indices and as denotations. Linguistics and Philosophy 32(2), 185–206 (2009b)
Gaifman, H.: Vagueness, tolerance and contextual logic, 41 pages (January 2002), http://www.columbia.edu/~hg17/ , (August 2009)
Kamp, H.: Events, instants and temporal reference. In: Bäuerle, R., Egli, U., von Stechow, A. (eds.) Semantics from Different Points of View, pp. 27–54. Springer, Berlin (1979)
van Lambalgen, M., Hamm, F.: The Proper Treatment of Events. Blackwell, Malden (2005)
Landman, F.: Structures for Semantics. Kluwer, Dordrecht (1991)
Steedman, M.: The Productions of Time. (July 2000), Draft ftp://ftp.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/pub/steedman/temporality/temporality.ps.gz ; Subsumes Temporality, van Benthem, J., ter Meulen, A. (eds.): Handbook of Logic and Language, pp. 895–935. Elsevier North Holland (1997)
Thomason, S.K.: On constructing instants from events. Journal of Philosophical Logic 13, 85–96 (1984)
Thomason, S.K.: Free constructions of time from events. Journal of Philosophical Logic 18, 43–67 (1989)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Fernando, T. (2010). Temporal Propositions as Vague Predicates. In: Aloni, M., Bastiaanse, H., de Jager, T., Schulz, K. (eds) Logic, Language and Meaning. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 6042. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-14287-1_15
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-14287-1_15
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-14286-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-14287-1
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)