A concept is vague if it admits of borderline cases—cases in which it is not clear whether the concept applies. Thus vague concepts are concepts without sharp boundaries. I argue that religion is vague, and I draw conclusions from this claim for both framing up conceptions of religion and studying it. One result will be to undermine arguments to the effect that any account of religion that does not sharply demarcate the religious from the nonreligious is somehow defective. Another will be that admitting the existence of borderline cases relieves us of the obligation to seek high levels of precision in our various usages of the term. And a third will be that is it not at all clear that any periods of human history can be characterized as times “before religion” on any but the narrowest of definitions.

中文翻译：

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宗教的模糊性

如果一个概念存在边界情况，即不清楚该概念是否适用的情况，那么该概念就是模糊的。因此，模糊概念是没有明确界限的概念。我认为宗教是模糊的，我从这一主张中得出结论，既可以构建宗教概念，也可以研究宗教。一个结果将是削弱这样的论点：任何对宗教的解释如果没有严格区分宗教与非宗教，都是有缺陷的。另一个原因是，承认边界案例的存在使我们免除了在该术语的各种用法中寻求高度精确性的义务。第三个问题是，除了最狭隘的定义之外，人类历史的任何时期都可以被描述为“宗教之前”的时代，这一点根本不清楚。