On the near side of semantic content we find only conventional meaning, disambiguation, and resolution of reference and vagueness.
The late 20th century speaks in her arbitrary metaphors (night as a "soft town," the outlines of things as "Ophelias"), her vagueness of reference ("like this"), her solemn ejaculations ("Blurrings. Wings").
Some time ago, a study in Franklin, Indiana [this vagueness of reference is all too typical of "The Other America"], reported that the percentage of people in the bottom class who were without affiliations of any kind was eight times as great as the percentage in the high-income class.
Near-side pragmatics includes, but is not limited to resolution of ambiguity and vagueness, the reference of proper names, indexicals and demonstratives, and anaphors, and at least some issues involving presupposition.
He tried to get rid of vagueness and reference to E, the set of finitely definable reals in the unit interval, by fixing an explicit "Gödel-numbering": given a natural number n, write n in base B, for sufficiently large B (so as to include the number of alphabet letters plus punctuation marks).
On the near side, ambiguities, references, and issues of vagueness will be resolved so as to make the 'explicature' — the relevance theoretic replacement for 'what is said,' or 'the proposition expressed' — maximally relevant.
It appears extremely wide, its voracity swallowing almost everything, its vagueness deriving from references to other voracious concepts, like social capital, sustainability, participation, quality of life, wisdom, community, which, like parsley, are good to season almost every dish.
A statement's logical form, in turn, would help resolve various problems of reference associated with the ambiguity and vagueness of natural language.
Cappelen and Lepore's (2005) term is 'semantic content.' On the near side of semantic content will be only the factors acknowledged by Grice: conventional meaning of words and modes of composition; resolution of ambiguity (including, perhaps, issues of standards of precision and vagueness), and resolution of reference of indexicals, demonstratives and names.
In addition, the lack of consistent information about past biodiversity states is likely to maintain vagueness and promote the shifting baseline reference syndrome4,5,6 by creating uncertainty about past states of biodiversity14,42.
(Afghanistan was, in fact, among the conquests of Timur the Great, as he is currently known in Uzbekistan, where he is regarded as a national hero.) But even if such a reference is intended, its resonance is lost in the vagueness of its expression.
