George Eliot's Vagueness

This essay examines George Eliot's preoccupation with the logical problem of vagueness: the idea that our language is riddled with blurry concepts and fuzzy truth-conditions that are impossible to circumscribe with the rigorous precision required by our binary logic. By reading Middlemarch (1872-73) alongside nineteenth- and twentieth-century work in logic and the philosophy of language (George Boole, John Venn, Gottlob Frege, and Ludwig Wittgenstein), I argue that Eliot links the problem of vagueness to both the difficulty and the importance of reasoning about erotic desire and its ethical claims. In the end, the "bad logic" of vagueness provides for Eliot a model of clarity that is ordinary rather than ideal.