Not Exactly

• Explores a basic but often unnoticed aspect of our lives - the vagueness inherent in many of our expressions and concepts
• Uses familiar everyday examples in a wide-ranging discussion touching on symbolic logic, game theory, computing, and biology
• Demonstrates why the concept of vagueness is both useful and unavoidable in human behaviour
• Looks at challenges arising from this very human way of thinking and expression in various areas, including speech recognition and designing more human-seeming robots

Readership: The serious lay reader, and also of interest to academics and students in a range of disciplines.

Kees van Deemter, Reader in Computing Science, University of Aberdeen

Kees van Deemter is a Reader in Computing Science at the University of Aberdeen. He works in computational linguistics, the area of artificial intelligence where computer science meets linguistics and his main areas of expertise are computational semantics and natural language generation. He has previously authored 90 research publications in philosophical logic, artificial intelligence and computational linguistics.

Review(s) from previous edition

"Amusing, persuasive. conversational and engaging. - John Gilbey, Times Higher Education Supplement

"Engaging and approachable book." - John Gilbey, Times Higher Education Supplement

Prologue
1: Introduction: False Clarity
Part 1: Vagueness, where one leasts expects it
2: Sex and similarity: On the Fiction of Species
3: Measurements that Matter
4: Identity and Gradual Change
5: Vagueness in Numbers and Maths
Part II: Theories of Vagueness
6: The Linguistics of Vagueness
7: Reasoning with Vague Information
8: Parrying a Paradox
9: Degrees of Truth
Part III: Working Models of Vagueness
10: Artificial Intelligence
11: When to be Vague: Computers as Authors
12: The Explusion from Boole's Paradise
Epilogue: Guaranteed Correct
Endnotes
Further Reading
Bibliography