Where does a room end and a hallway begin?

Question

Has anyone studied vagueness theory? It asks at what point is a "heap" no longer a "heap" and other such aporiae.

Does it begin at the doorway or after the doorway?

Thanks for the answers so far. This question actually has some practical value to educators since scholl administrators normally say that no student should be in the hallway, but must remain in the room until the bell rings. Students now and again stand in the "doorway," near the end of class but administration considers them to be standing in the "hallway," if they are at or "in" the "doorway." I think those students who complain about the strictures of administration might have a valid argument when they say that the "doorway" is part of the room, not part of the hallway. Leave it to teenagers!

I should have written "school" above.

Answer 1

OK an architectural answer here. A door is framed out with 2 x 6's - the actual width of them being 5 1/2 inches. Therefore there is 5 1/2 inches of space that is neither "room" nor "hallway" because it is fact the space in which the door is hung. So you can say that the hallway begins 5.5 inches from the end of the room. Or you can split the difference and give 2.25 inches of space to both - making the hallway start halfway or 2.25 inches inside the space taken up by the door. Personally I will go along with the first answer. The hallway begins 5.5 inches past the end of the room - with those 5.5 inches being taken up by "doorway" space. Pax - C.

Answer 2

Gosh! What can I say? Where should I begin? (Inside joke, there.)

To approach the threshold of understanding, I'd suggest reading this discussion:
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/10/129.html
Scan down to the posting by Tom Verso "Ta meta ta historika" as regards history.
You'll probably find this more technical discussion interesting also:
http://brian.weatherson.org/Ch_4.pdf

However, it seems to me that your room and hallway question, taken literally, can normally be defined pretty clearly since a room is usually demarcated by walls or some other means that separate it distinctly from adjoining areas such as hallways, balconies, etc. And, if there's a door with its surrounding frame, that would, at least for me, provide a defintive threshold.
It's not like trying to decide when red becomes orange which I see as a matter of definition according to some scientific or esthetic criteria.
In more abstract areas of thought such as history and theology, it's probably as much a matter of semantics and defintiion of terms as it is of any concepts.
It's also a matter of "how vague is vague?". Is there a hierarchy of vagueness?
Much of this is still open for debate and I would think that, by its very nature, will remain so indefinitely. The hell of it is that the devil is in the aporiae. ;)

Answer 3

In the doorway...there usually is a visible line in the flooring that separates the two, but if there is no line, a doorway is still a doorWAY - the very word suggest that at the point of where a door would be, so begins the next area.

Answer 4

the doorway. and the doorway is a boundary, so it need not belong to either, one side is the hallway, the other the room.
a heap is no longer a heap when the person defining it thinks it is no longer a heap. the same should apply for the hallway and room, but general consensus is established so that is not technically necessary, whereas what i call a heap might be a pile to you, and all that differentiates them are individual perceptions.

Answer 5

The room ends at the doorway and the hallway begins at the doorway.

Answer 6

At the doorway.

Answer 7

Here's how I used to find the answer to this question when I was a kid.

I'd spill something. When Mom got mad, she'd say: "You spill something in the hallway (or room), clean it up!!"

Worked every time. And no "vagueness theory" applied.