The Vagueness of Ordinary Language and Its Impact on the Pragmatic Turn

Abstract

The significant contribution of ordinary language to the pragmatic turn in analytic philosophy has received a great deal of attention from philosophers and linguists, but there is still a gap in the special study of the influence of ordinary language on the pragmatic turn from the perspective of its vagueness. On the basis of the fact that ideal language cannot portray the reality of some linguistic facts, this article compares and analyzes the differences between ideal language and ordinary language in terms of vagueness, and further argue that ordinary language cannot exist in the process of language use in isolation from the reality of the situation through three subdivisions of vagueness: roughness, ambiguity, and incompleteness. The vagueness creates the opportunities for language to be used in a way that is closely tied to the actual situation, dismantling the artificially shaped conditions of perfect use of the ideal language and redirecting the philosophers' attention to the concrete elaboration of language. In this manner, philosophy's concern of ordinary language use and the subjective experience of language users coincides with pragmatics and further drives philosophy to take a pragmatic turn.