Looking at von Kármán, who worked in aerodynamics and, well…
– boundary conditions (my interest)
– large deflection of elastic plates
– model of lattice dynamics for a crystal (used in QM) – also interest
– potential flow
– turbulence, combustion, boundary layers, flow, velocity… etc
and I’m generally ok with the notion of binary 0/1 as a pragmatic solution for “effective range” (0 is an effective range, 1 is an effective range) – yet what about the / part?
Vagueness then comes to mind and I remember this:
“A range of application is a range of properties to whose instantiations the word can competently be applied. (E.g., a range of ‘tall’ is a set of heights, a range of ‘adult’ a set of ages.”
The Multiple Range Theory of Vagueness
Diana Raffman
Chapter 4 gets to the heart of the theory: the reference of a vague word. The existence of multiple equally competent , arbitrarily different ways of applying a vague word — a feature of its use — is taken to be evidence of multiple ranges of application in its semantics. A range of application is a range of properties to whose instantiations the word can competently be applied. (E.g., a range of ‘tall’ is a set of heights, a range of ‘adult’ a set of ages.) The fundamental idea is that a vague word has multiple ranges of application relative to a given context, and it applies to (is true of) a different set of items relative to each range of application. Chapter 4 develops a multiple range semantics for vague terms, and also advances a definition of vagueness and resolution of the sorites paradox.