Towards a Probabilistic Semantics for Vague Adjectives

A way of modelling the meanings of vague terms directly in terms of the uncertainties they give rise to is explored. These uncertainties are modelled with a probabilistic, Bayesian version of situation semantics on which meaning is captured as the correlations between uses of words and the types of situations those words are used to refer to. It is argued that doing so provides a framework from which vagueness arises naturally. It is also claimed that such a framework is in a position to better capture the boundarylessness of vague concepts.