Switch to: References

Citations of:

Vagueness

Philosophical Review 107 (4):637 (1998)

Add citations

You must login to add citations.
  1. Assessment Sensitivity: Relative Truth and its Applications.John MacFarlane - 2014 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    John MacFarlane explores how we might make sense of the idea that truth is relative. He provides new, satisfying accounts of parts of our thought and talk that have resisted traditional methods of analysis, including what we mean when we talk about what is tasty, what we know, what will happen, what might be the case, and what we ought to do.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   448 citations  
  • Verbal Disputes.David J. Chalmers - 2011 - Philosophical Review 120 (4):515-566.
    The philosophical interest of verbal disputes is twofold. First, they play a key role in philosophical method. Many philosophical disagreements are at least partly verbal, and almost every philosophical dispute has been diagnosed as verbal at some point. Here we can see the diagnosis of verbal disputes as a tool for philosophical progress. Second, they are interesting as a subject matter for first-order philosophy. Reflection on the existence and nature of verbal disputes can reveal something about the nature of concepts, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   237 citations  
  • Against Denialism.John Broome - 2019 - The Monist 102 (1):110-129.
    Several philosophers deny that an individual person’s emissions of greenhouse gas do any harm; I call these “individual denialists.” I argue that each individual’s emissions may do harm, and that they certainly do expected harm. I respond to the denialists’ arguments.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   57 citations  
  • The Good, the Bad, and the Transitivity of Better Than.Jacob M. Nebel - 2018 - Noûs 52 (4):874-899.
    The Rachels–Temkin spectrum arguments against the transitivity of better than involve good or bad experiences, lives, or outcomes that vary along multiple dimensions—e.g., duration and intensity of pleasure or pain. This paper presents variations on these arguments involving combinations of good and bad experiences, which have even more radical implications than the violation of transitivity. These variations force opponents of transitivity to conclude that something good is worse than something that isn’t good, on pain of rejecting the good altogether. That (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   37 citations  
  • Ontic Vagueness: A Guide for the Perplexed.Elizabeth Barnes - 2010 - Noûs 44 (4):601-627.
    In this paper I develop a framework for understanding ontic vagueness. The project of the paper is two-fold. I first outline a definitional account of ontic vagueness – one that I think is an improvement on previous attempts because it remains neutral on other, independent metaphysical issues. I then develop one potential manifestation of that basic definitional structure. This is a more robust (and much less neutral) account which gives a fully classical explication of ontic vagueness via modal concepts. The (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   127 citations  
  • Semantic Plasticity and Speech Reports.Cian Dorr & John Hawthorne - 2014 - Philosophical Review 123 (3):281-338.
    Most meanings we express belong to large families of variant meanings, among which it would be implausible to suppose that some are much more apt for being expressed than others. This abundance of candidate meanings creates pressure to think that the proposition attributing any particular meaning to an expression is modally plastic: its truth depends very sensitively on the exact microphysical state of the world. However, such plasticity seems to threaten ordinary counterfactuals whose consequents contain speech reports, since it is (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   63 citations  
  • Killing Kripkenstein's Monster.Jared Warren - 2020 - Noûs 54 (2):257-289.
    Here I defend dispositionalism about meaning and rule-following from Kripkenstein's infamous anti-dispositionalist arguments. The problems of finitude, error, and normativity are all addressed. The general lesson I draw is that Kripkenstein's arguments trade on an overly simplistic version of dispositionalism.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   24 citations  
  • Inconsistent Languages.Matti Eklund - 2002 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 64 (2):251-275.
    The main thesis of this paper is that we sometimes are disposed to accept false and even jointly inconsistent claims by virtue of our semantic competence, and that this comes to light in the sorites and liar paradoxes. Among the subsidiary theses are that this is an important source of indeterminacy in truth conditions, that we must revise basic assumptions about semantic competence, and that classical logic and bivalence can be upheld in the face of the sorites paradox.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   111 citations  
  • Vague, So Untrue.David Braun & Theodore Sider - 2007 - Noûs 41 (2):133 - 156.
    According to an old and attractive view, vagueness must be eliminated before semantic notions — truth, implication, and so on — may be applied. This view was accepted by Frege, but is rarely defended nowadays.1 This..
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   72 citations  
  • The significance argument for the irreducibility of consciousness.Adam Pautz - 2017 - Philosophical Perspectives 31 (1):349-407.
    The Significance Argument (SA) for the irreducibility of consciousness is based on a series of new puzzle-cases that I call multiple candidate cases. In these cases, there is a multiplicity of physical-functional properties or relations that are candidates to be identified with the sensible qualities and our consciousness of them, where those candidates are not significantly different. I will argue that these cases show that reductive materialists cannot accommodate the various ways in which consciousness is significant and must allow massive (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   20 citations  
  • Talking about worlds.Matthew Mandelkern - 2018 - Philosophical Perspectives 32 (1):298-325.
    I explore the logic of the conditional, using credence judgments to argue against Duality and in favor of Conditional Excluded Middle. I then explore how to give a theory of the conditional which validates the latter and not the former, developing a variant on Kratzer (1981)'s restrictor theory, as well as a proposal which combines Stalnaker (1968)'s theory of the conditional with the theory of epistemic modals I develop in Mandelkern 2019a. I argue that the latter approach fits naturally with (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   21 citations  
  • Mereological Nihilism and Puzzles about Material Objects.Bradley Rettler - 2018 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 99 (4):842-868.
    Mereological nihilism is the view that no objects have proper parts. Despite how counter‐intuitive it is, it is taken quite seriously, largely because it solves a number of puzzles in the metaphysics of material objects – or so its proponents claim. In this article, I show that for every puzzle that mereological nihilism solves, there is a similar puzzle that (a) it doesn’t solve, and (b) every other solution to the original puzzle does solve. Since the solutions to the new (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   13 citations  
  • The Minimal A-theory.Meghan Sullivan - 2012 - Philosophical Studies 158 (2):149-174.
    Timothy Williamson thinks that every object is a necessary, eternal existent. In defense of his view, Williamson appeals primarily to considerations from modal and tense logic. While I am uncertain about his modal claims, I think there are good metaphysical reasons to believe permanentism: the principle that everything always exists. B-theorists of time and change have long denied that objects change with respect to unqualified existence. But aside from Williamson, nearly all A-theorists defend temporaryism: the principle that there are temporary (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   53 citations  
  • Legal Probabilism: A Qualified Defence.Brian Hedden & Mark Colyvan - 2019 - Journal of Political Philosophy 27 (4):448-468.
    Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   24 citations  
  • Truth and freedom.Trenton Merricks - 2009 - Philosophical Review 118 (1):29-57.
    Suppose that time t is just a few moments from now. And suppose that the proposition that Jones sits at t was true a thousand years ago. Does the thousand-years-ago truth of that proposition imply that Jones's upcoming sitting at t will not be free? This article argues that it does not. It also argues that Jones even now has a choice about the thousand-years-ago truth of that Jones sits at t . Those arguments do not require the complex machinery (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   64 citations  
  • Vagueness in the world.Ken Akiba - 2004 - Noûs 38 (3):407–429.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   78 citations  
  • Vagueness as Indecision.John MacFarlane - 2016 - Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 90 (1):255-283.
    This paper motivates and explores an expressivist theory of vagueness, modelled on Allan Gibbard’s normative expressivism. It shows how Chris Kennedy’s semantics for gradable adjectives can be adjusted to fit into a theory on Gibbardian lines, where assertions constrain not just possible worlds but plans for action. Vagueness, on this account, is literally indecision about where to draw lines. It is argued that the distinctive phenomena of vagueness, such as the intuition of tolerance, can be explained in terms of practical (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   36 citations  
  • Gradational accuracy and nonclassical semantics.J. Robert G. Williams - 2012 - Review of Symbolic Logic 5 (4):513-537.
    Joyce (1998) gives an argument for probabilism: the doctrine that rational credences should conform to the axioms of probability. In doing so, he provides a distinctive take on how the normative force of probabilism relates to the injunction to believe what is true. But Joyce presupposes that the truth values of the propositions over which credences are defined are classical. I generalize the core of Joyce’s argument to remove this presupposition. On the same assumptions as Joyce uses, the credences of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   32 citations  
  • Composition as pattern.Steve Petersen - 2019 - Philosophical Studies 176 (5):1119-1139.
    I argue for patternism, a new answer to the question of when some objects compose a whole. None of the standard principles of composition comfortably capture our natural judgments, such as that my cat exists and my table exists, but there is nothing wholly composed of them. Patternism holds, very roughly, that some things compose a whole whenever together they form a “real pattern”. Plausibly we are inclined to acknowledge the existence of my cat and my table but not of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   11 citations  
  • Hell and Vagueness.Theodore Sider - 2002 - Faith and Philosophy 19 (1):58--68.
    A certain conception of Hell is inconsistent with God's traditional attributes. My argument is novel in focusing on considerations involving vagueness. God is in charge of the selection procedure, so the selection procedure must be just; any just procedure will have borderline cases; but according to the traditional conception, the afterlife is binary and has no borderline cases.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   32 citations  
  • Many many problems.Brian Weatherson - 2003 - Philosophical Quarterly 53 (213):481–501.
    Recently four different papers have suggested that the supervaluational solution to the Problem of the Many is flawed. Stephen Schiffer has argued that the theory cannot account for reports of speech involving vague singular terms. Vann McGee and Brian McLaughlin say that theory cannot, yet, account for vague singular beliefs. Neil McKinnon has argued that we cannot provide a plausible theory of when precisifications are acceptable, which the supervaluational theory needs. And Roy Sorensen argues that supervaluationism is inconsistent with a (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   53 citations  
  • Vagueness, multiplicity and parts.Daniel Nolan - 2006 - Noûs 40 (4):716–737.
    There’s an argument around from so-called “linguistic theories of vagueness”, plus some relatively uncontroversial considerations, to powerful metaphysical conclusions. David Lewis employs this argument to support the mereological principle of unrestricted composition, and Theodore Sider employs a similar argument not just for unrestricted composition but also for the doctrine of temporal parts. This sort of argument could be generalised, to produce a lot of other less palatable metaphysical conclusions. However, arguments to Lewis’s and Sider’s conclusions on the basis of considerations (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   33 citations  
  • Objective Probability in Everettian Quantum Mechanics.Alastair Wilson - 2013 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 64 (4):709-737.
    David Wallace has given a decision-theoretic argument for the Born Rule in the context of Everettian quantum mechanics. This approach promises to resolve some long-standing problems with probability in EQM, but it has faced plenty of resistance. One kind of objection charges that the requisite notion of decision-theoretic uncertainty is unavailable in the Everettian picture, so that the argument cannot gain any traction; another kind of objection grants the proof’s applicability and targets the premises. In this article I propose some (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   27 citations  
  • Alternative Logics and Applied Mathematics.Timothy Williamson - 2018 - Philosophical Issues 28 (1):399-424.
    Many advocates of non-classical logic for reasons external to mathematics claim that their proposed revisions are consistent with the use of classical logic within pure mathematics. Doubts are raised about such claims, concerning the applicability of pure mathematics to natural and social science. -/- .
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   18 citations  
  • The Logicality of Language: A new take on Triviality, “Ungrammaticality”, and Logical Form.Guillermo Del Pinal - 2017 - Noûs 53 (4):785-818.
    Recent work in formal semantics suggests that the language system includes not only a structure building device, as standardly assumed, but also a natural deductive system which can determine when expressions have trivial truth-conditions (e.g., are logically true/false) and mark them as unacceptable. This hypothesis, called the `logicality of language', accounts for many acceptability patterns, including systematic restrictions on the distribution of quantifiers. To deal with apparent counter-examples consisting of acceptable tautologies and contradictions, the logicality of language is often paired (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   11 citations  
  • Subjunctive Credences and Semantic Humility.Sarah Moss - 2012 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 87 (2):251-278.
    This paper argues that several leading theories of subjunctive conditionals are incompatible with ordinary intuitions about what credences we ought to have in subjunctive conditionals. In short, our theory of subjunctives should intuitively display semantic humility, i.e. our semantic theory should deliver the truth conditions of sentences without pronouncing on whether those conditions actually obtain. In addition to describing intuitions about subjunctive conditionals, I argue that we can derive these ordinary intuitions from justified premises, and I answer a possible worry (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   32 citations  
  • What Does Knowledge-yielding Deduction Require Of Its Premises?Federico Luzzi - 2014 - Episteme 11 (3):261-275.
    According to the principle of Knowledge Counter-Closure , knowledge-yielding single-premise deduction requires a known premise: if S believes q solely on the basis of deduction from p, and S knows q, then S must know p. Although prima facie plausible, widely accepted, and supported by seemingly compelling motivations, KCC has recently been challenged by cases where S arguably knows q solely on the basis of deduction from p, yet p is false or p is true but not known . I (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   27 citations  
  • Vagueness & Modality—An Ecumenical Approach.Jon Erling Litland & Juhani Yli-Vakkuri - 2016 - Philosophical Perspectives 30 (1):229-269.
    How does vagueness interact with metaphysical modality and with restrictions of it, such as nomological modality? In particular, how do definiteness, necessity (understood as restricted in some way or not), and actuality interact? This paper proposes a model-theoretic framework for investigating the logic and semantics of that interaction. The framework is put forward in an ecumenical spirit: it is intended to be applicable to all theories of vagueness that express vagueness using a definiteness (or: determinacy) operator. We will show how (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   11 citations  
  • Deconstructing Ontological Vagueness.Matti Eklund - 2008 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 38 (1):117-140.
    I will here present a number of problems concerning the idea that there is ontological vagueness, and the related claim that appeal to this idea can help solve some vagueness-related problems. A theme underlying the discussion will be the distinction between vagueness specifically and indeterminacy more generally (and, relatedly, the distinction between ontological vagueness and ontological indeterminacy). Even if the world is somehow ontologically indeterminate it by no means follows that it is, properly speaking, ontologically vague.1..
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   19 citations  
  • Typicality, Graded Membership, and Vagueness.James A. Hampton - 2007 - Cognitive Science 31 (3):355-384.
    This paper addresses theoretical problems arising from the vagueness of language terms, and intuitions of the vagueness of the concepts to which they refer. It is argued that the central intuitions of prototype theory are sufficient to account for both typicality phenomena and psychological intuitions about degrees of membership in vaguely defined classes. The first section explains the importance of the relation between degrees of membership and typicality (or goodness of example) in conceptual categorization. The second and third section address (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   42 citations  
  • The Hard Problem of the Many.Jonathan A. Simon - 2017 - Philosophical Perspectives 31 (1):449-468.
    A problem of the many Fs arises in cases where intuitively there is precisely one F (in the region you are talking about), but when you look closely you find many candidates for being that F, each one apparently as well-qualified as the next. Imagine an apparently solitary cloud in an otherwise blue sky. Look closer, and you'll see lots of water vapor molecules, with no one collection of them more eligible than the others to count as the cloud. Many (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   13 citations  
  • What is Absolute Undecidability?†.Justin Clarke-Doane - 2012 - Noûs 47 (3):467-481.
    It is often supposed that, unlike typical axioms of mathematics, the Continuum Hypothesis (CH) is indeterminate. This position is normally defended on the ground that the CH is undecidable in a way that typical axioms are not. Call this kind of undecidability “absolute undecidability”. In this paper, I seek to understand what absolute undecidability could be such that one might hope to establish that (a) CH is absolutely undecidable, (b) typical axioms are not absolutely undecidable, and (c) if a mathematical (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   14 citations  
  • Modeling practical thinking.Matthew Mosdell - 2018 - Mind and Language 34 (4):445-464.
    Intellectualists about knowledge how argue that knowing how to do something is knowing the content of a proposition (i.e, a fact). An important component of this view is the idea that propositional knowledge is translated into behavior when it is presented to the mind in a peculiarly practical way. Until recently, however, intellectualists have not said much about what it means for propositional knowledge to be entertained under thought's practical guise. Carlotta Pavese fills this gap in the intellectualist view by (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  • What Verities May Be.Igor Douven & Lieven Decock - 2017 - Mind 126 (502):386-428.
    Edgington has proposed a solution to the sorites paradox in terms of ‘verities’, which she defines as degrees of closeness to clear truth. Central to her solution is the assumption that verities are formally probabilities. She is silent on what verities might derive from and on why they should be probabilities. This paper places Edgington’s solution in the framework of a spatial approach to conceptualization, arguing that verities may be conceived of as deriving from how our concepts relate to each (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   16 citations  
  • Vagueness without context change.Rosanna Keefe - 2007 - Mind 116 (462):275-292.
    In this paper I offer a critique of the recent popular strategy of giving a contextualist account of vagueness. Such accounts maintain that truth-values of vague sentences can change with changes of context induced by confronting different entities (e.g. different pairs through a sorites series). I claim that appealing to context does not help in solving the sorites paradox, nor does it give us new insights into vagueness per se. Furthermore, the contextual variation to which the contextualist is committed is (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   34 citations  
  • The metaphysical implications of the moral significance of consciousness.Brian Cutter - 2017 - Philosophical Perspectives 31 (1):103-130.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   13 citations  
  • An “I” for an I: Singular terms, uniqueness, and reference.Stewart Shapiro - 2012 - Review of Symbolic Logic 5 (3):380-415.
    There is an interesting logical/semantic issue with some mathematical languages and theories. In the language of (pure) complex analysis, the two square roots of i’ manage to pick out a unique object? This is perhaps the most prominent example of the phenomenon, but there are some others. The issue is related to matters concerning the use of definite descriptions and singular pronouns, such as donkey anaphora and the problem of indistinguishable participants. Taking a cue from some work in linguistics and (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   23 citations  
  • Imprecise Probabilities and Unstable Betting Behaviour.Anna Mahtani - 2014 - Noûs 52 (1):69-87.
    Many have argued that a rational agent's attitude towards a proposition may be better represented by a probability range than by a single number. I show that in such cases an agent will have unstable betting behaviour, and so will behave in an unpredictable way. I use this point to argue against a range of responses to the ‘two bets’ argument for sharp probabilities.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   12 citations  
  • Macroscopic ontology in Everettian quantum mechanics.Alastair Wilson - 2011 - Philosophical Quarterly 61 (243):363-382.
    Simon Saunders and David Wallace have proposed an attractive semantics for interpreting linguistic communities embedded in an Everettian multiverse. It provides a charitable interpretation of our ordinary talk about the future, and allows us to retain a principle of bivalence for propositions and to retain the law of excluded middle in the logic of propositions about the future. But difficulties arise when it comes to providing an appropriate account of the metaphysics of macroscopic objects and events. I evaluate various metaphysical (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   26 citations  
  • Degree supervaluational logic.J. Robert G. Williams - 2011 - Review of Symbolic Logic 4 (1):130-149.
    Supervaluationism is often described as the most popular semantic treatment of indeterminacy. There’s little consensus, however, about how to fill out the bare-bones idea to include a characterization of logical consequence. The paper explores one methodology for choosing between the logics: pick a logic thatnorms beliefas classical consequence is standardly thought to do. The main focus of the paper considers a variant of standard supervaluational, on which we can characterizedegrees of determinacy. It applies the methodology above to focus ondegree logic. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   14 citations  
  • Uncertainty behind the Veil of Ignorance.A. Faik Kurtulmus - 2012 - Utilitas 24 (1):41-62.
    This article argues that the decision problem in the original position should be characterized as a decision problem under uncertainty even when it is assumed that the denizens of the original position know that they have an equal chance of ending up in any given individual’s place. It supports this claim by arguing that (a) the continuity axiom of decision theory does not hold between all of the outcomes the denizens of the original position face and that (b) neither us (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   19 citations  
  • Formal Representations of Belief.Franz Huber - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Epistemology is the study of knowledge and justified belief. Belief is thus central to epistemology. It comes in a qualitative form, as when Sophia believes that Vienna is the capital of Austria, and a quantitative form, as when Sophia's degree of belief that Vienna is the capital of Austria is at least twice her degree of belief that tomorrow it will be sunny in Vienna. Formal epistemology, as opposed to mainstream epistemology (Hendricks 2006), is epistemology done in a formal way, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   26 citations  
  • Beyond the Humphrey Objection.Theodore Sider - 2006
    I defend counterpart theory against post-Kripkean objections. Trenton Merricks objects that no construction of ersatz counterparts is uniquely and intrinsically suitable; I reply that metaphysical constructions need not have these features. Sarah Moss refutes my solution (from "All the world's a stage") to the problem of timeless counting for temporal counterpart theory; I offer a new solution. Hazen, Fara, Williamson, and others have objected that counterpart theory generates an unacceptable logic for an actuality operator; I attempt to give a better (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   15 citations  
  • Inscrutability and its discontents.Vann McGee - 2005 - Noûs 39 (3):397–425.
    That reference is inscrutable is demonstrated, it is argued, not only by W. V. Quine's arguments but by Peter Unger's "Problem of the Many." Applied to our own language, this is a paradoxical result, since nothing could be more obvious to speakers of English than that, when they use the word "rabbit," they are talking about rabbits. The solution to this paradox is to take a disquotational view of reference for one's own language, so that "When I use 'rabbit,' I (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   27 citations  
  • Typicality and Graded Membership in Dimensional Adjectives.Steven Verheyen & Paul Égré - 2018 - Cognitive Science 42 (7):2250-2286.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
  • Philosophical Method and Intuitions as Assumptions.Kevin Patrick Tobia - 2015 - Metaphilosophy 46 (4-5):575-594.
    Many philosophers claim to employ intuitions in their philosophical arguments. Others contest that no such intuitions are used frequently or at all in philosophy. This article suggests and defends a conception of intuitions as part of the philosophical method: intuitions are special types of philosophical assumptions to which we are invited to assent, often as premises in argument, that may serve an independent function in philosophical argument and that are not formed through a purely inferential process. A series of philosophical (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  • Does Vagueness Exclude Knowledge?David Barnett - 2010 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 82 (1):22 - 45.
    On two standard views of vagueness, vagueness as to whether Harry is bald entails that nobody knows whether Harry is bald—either because vagueness is a type of missing truth, and so there is nothing to know, or because vagueness is a type of ignorance, and so even though there is a truth of the matter, nobody can know what that truth is. Vagueness as to whether Harry is bald does entail that nobody clearly knows that Harry is bald and that (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   18 citations  
  • On the Arbitrariness Objection to the Threshold View.Matthew Lee - 2017 - Dialogue 56 (1):143-158.
    ABSTRACT: Proponents of the ‘Threshold View’ have held that to believe a proposition is to be sufficiently confident of the proposition’s truth, but that there is no sharp cutoff between degrees of confidence that constitute belief and degrees of confidence that do not. Brian Weatherson has objected that no plausible account of vagueness can support this view. In this paper, I reply to Weatherson’s objection. Along the way, I identify a way in which one might hope to maintain the Threshold (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
  • Proper nouns.Samuel Cumming - 2007 - Dissertation, Rutgers - New Brunswick
    This dissertation is an experiment: what happens if we treat proper names as anaphoric expressions on a par with pronouns? The first thing to notice is that a name's 'antecedent' can occur in a discourse prior to the one containing the name. An individual may be introduced and tagged with a name in one context, and then retrieved using the name in a later context. To allow for discourse crossing anaphora, in addition to the usual cross-sentential anaphora, a revision of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   13 citations  
  • Intransitivity and vagueness.Joseph Y. Halpern - 2008 - Review of Symbolic Logic 1 (4):530-547.
    There are many examples in the literature that suggest that indistinguishability is intransitive, despite the fact that the indistinguishability relation is typically taken to be an equivalence relation (and thus transitive). It is shown that if the uncertainty perception and the question of when an agent reports that two things are indistinguishable are both carefully modeled, the problems disappear, and indistinguishability can indeed be taken to be an equivalence relation. Moreover, this model also suggests a logic of vagueness that seems (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   20 citations