Publications
Publication details [#8281]
Sadock, Jerrold M. 1977. Truth and approximations. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society 3 : 430–439.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Keywords
Annotation
S. addresses problems of the following type: why is 'Sam is approximately six feet tall' a worse approximation of the truth if Sam is 5'8" tall than 'That cockroach is approximately six feet tall' if the cockroach is in reality 5'8" tall? He claims that a pragmatic account is more explanatory than an account in terms of fuzzy semantics. It seems to be the conversational purpose of an estimate that essentially determines how close to the truth it must be to be a 'good' estimate.