ABSTRACT
Logicians are often accused of treating language as though it were precise, and ignoring its vagueness. Their standards of valid and invalid reasoning are held to be good enough for artificial precise languages, but to break down when applied to the natural vague languages in which we actually reason about the world that we experience. A perfectly precise language for such reasoning is an idealization never to be realized. Although we can make our language less vague, we cannot make it perfectly precise. If we try to do so by stipulating what our words are to mean, our stipulations will themselves be made in less than perfectly precise terms, and the reformed language will inherit some of that vagueness.
