Let a smooth experience be an experience with perfectly gradual changes in phenomenal character. Consider, as examples, your visual experience of a blue sky or your auditory experience of a rising pitch. Do the phenomenal characters of smooth experiences have continuous or discrete structures? If we appeal merely to introspection, then it may seem that we should think that smooth experiences are continuous. This paper (1) uses formal tools to clarify what it means to say that an experience is continuous (...) or discrete, and (2) develops a discrete model of the phenomenal characters of smooth experiences. As a result, I'll argue that introspection leaves open whether smooth experiences are continuous or discrete. Yet I’ll also argue—perhaps surprisingly—that the discrete theory may better fit our introspective evidence. (shrink)

An analysis of a predicate normally takes the form of a condition that is both necessary and sufficient for the predicate's application. Here I consider the idea, due originally to Friedrich Waismann, that semantic analyses might include conditions that are defeasible, and so allow for exceptions. Analyses of this sort can be expressed in nonmonotonic logic, a post‐Waismann development. I'll argue that defeasibility makes analysis tractable, without making it trivial. I'll also show that a defeasible account of vague predicates can (...) predict our intuitions about particular cases (for instance, that a seven‐foot person counts as tall) without drawing artificial boundaries. (shrink)

The major reason given in the philosophical literature for dissatisfaction with theories of vagueness based on fuzzy logic is that such theories give rise to a problem of higherorder vagueness or artificial precision. In this paper I first outline the problem and survey suggested solutions: fuzzy epistemicism; measuring truth on an ordinal scale; logic as modelling; fuzzy metalanguages; blurry sets; and fuzzy plurivaluationism. I then argue that in order to decide upon a solution, we need to understand the true nature (...) and source of the problem. Two possible sources are discussed: the problem stems from the very nature of vagueness—from the defining features of vague predicates; or the problem stems from the way in which the meanings of predicates are determined—by the usage of speakers together with facts about their environment and so on. I argue that the latter is the true source of the problem, and on this basis that fuzzy plurivaluationism is the correct solution. (shrink)

Remember the story of the most-most? It’s the story of that club in New York where people are the most of every type. There is the hairiest bald man and the baldest hairy man; the shortest giant and the tallest dwarf; the smartest idiot and the stupidest wise man. They are all there, including honest thieves and crippled acrobats. On Saturday night they have a party, eat, drink, dance. Then they have a contest. “And if you can tell the hairiest (...) bald man from the baldest hairy man—we are told—you get a prize.”. (shrink)

Can identity itself be vague? Can there be vague objects? Does a positive answer to either question entail a positive answer to the other? In this paper we answer these questions as follows: No, No, and Yes. First, we discuss Evans’s famous 1978 argument and argue that the main lesson that it imparts is that identity itself cannot be vague. We defend the argument from objections and endorse this conclusion. We acknowledge, however, that the argument does not by itself establish (...) either that there cannot be vague objects or that there cannot be identity statements that are indeterminate for ontic reasons. And we further acknowledge that it does not by itself establish that there cannot be identity statements that are indeterminate in virtue of the existence of vague objects. We then go on to argue that, despite this, one who believes in vague objects cannot endorse Evans’s argument. To establish this we offer supplementary arguments that show that if vague objects exist then identity is vague, and that if identity is vague then vague objects exist. Finally we draw attention to an argument parallel to that of Evans’s, but safer, which can be employed against the putative ontic indeterminacy in identity of vague objects which can be differentiated by identity-free properties. (shrink)

Fallibilists about looks deny that the relation of looking the same as is non-transitive. Regarding familiar examples of coloured patches suggesting that such a relation is non-transitive, they argue that, in fact, indiscriminable adjacent patches may well look different, despite their perceptual indiscriminability: it’s just that we cannot notice the relevant differences in the chromatic appearances of such patches. In this paper, I present an argument that fallibilism about looks requires commitment to an empirically false consequence. To succeed in deflecting (...) putative cases of non-transitivity, fallibilists would have to claim that there can’t be any perceptual limitations of any kind on human chromatic discrimination. But there are good reasons to think such limitations exist. (shrink)

In this book, I present the results of an investigation which began with an extended stay at Oxford's Balliol College during the first half of 1995. My visit to Oxford was made possible by a grant from the Spanish Ministerio de Educaci6n y Ciencia. My sincere thanks go to Joseph Raz who served as my supervisor in Oxford. For several points of the present study, conversations with Timothy Endicott in Oxford were also of great help. The book is part of (...) a larger project of investigation, directed by Albert Calsami glia, which is a joint effort of a group of legal philosophers from the Universitat Pom peu Fabra and the Universitat de Girona, and which also receives financial support from the Spanish Ministerio de Educaci6n y Ciencia. An earlier version of the manuscript was presented in June 1996 to the selection committee for a tenured professorship in Legal Philosophy at the Universitat de Girona. The members of the committee were Francisco Laporta, Albert Calsamiglia, Gregorio Peces-Barba, Camilo J. Cela Conde, and Francesca Puigpelat. I am grateful to all of them for their comments, which have been extremely useful in preparing the final ver sion of this book. (shrink)

This book proposes a new solution to the problem of vagueness. There are several different ways of addressing this problem and no clear agreement on which one is correct. The author proposes that it should be understood as the problem of explaining vague predicates in a way that systematizes six intuitions about the phenomenon and satisfies three criteria of adequacy for an ideal theory of vagueness. The third criterion, which is called the “criterion of precisification”, is the most controversial one. (...) It is based on the intuition that a predicate is vague only if it is imprecise. The author considers some different definitions of linguistic imprecision, proposing that a predicate is imprecise if and only if there is no sharp boundary between objects to which its application yields some particular truth-value and objects to which its application does not yield that truth-value. The volume critically reviews the current theories of vagueness and proposes a new one, the Theory of Vagueness as Arbitrariness, which defines a vague predicate as an arbitrary predicate that must be precisified in order to contribute to a sentence that has truth-conditions. The main advantages of this theory over the current alternatives are that it satisfies all three criteria and systematizes the relevant intuitions. (shrink)

Several psychological experiments have suggested that concepts can influence perceived color (e.g., Delk and Fillenbaum in Am J Psychol 78(2):290–293, 1965, Hansen et al. in Nat Neurosci 9(11):1367–1368, 2006, Olkkonen et al. in J Vis 8(5):1–16, 2008). Observers tend to assign typical colors to objects even when the objects do not have those colors. Recently, these findings were used to argue that perceptual experience is cognitively penetrable (Macpherson 2012). This interpretation of the experiments has far-reaching consequences: it implies that the (...) way we think of objects determines how we see them, thus threatening the role of perception in justifying beliefs. In this paper, I show that the psychological findings can be accounted for without admitting cognitive penetrability. An underestimated but key feature of the experiments is that observers had to judge colors in borderline cases, in conditions of reduced acuity, or on the basis of color-concepts instead of matching. Such judgments are sensitive to the form of bias that Tversky and Kahneman (Science 185:1124–1131, 1974) have termed ‘anchoring’. Adopting a suggestion from Raffman (Philos Rev 103(1):41–74, 1994), I argue that the way subjects in the experiments think of the objects could affect their color judgments without altering their color experiences. (shrink)

In The Varieties of Reference, Evans makes two parallel claims about thought and perception. He argues that both our capacity to self-ascribe thought and our capacity to self-ascribe perception are fallible. The essay focuses on his claim about perception and examines its relation to Evans's project of rejecting a Cartesian conception of the mind. In his theory of perception, I argue, Evans embraces a conception of first-person authority that he seeks to reject in his account of thought. He is thus (...) not able to extend to perception the critique of Cartesianism that he develops in the context of his analysis of thought. My intent is not exclusively critical. By working through the difficulties that Evans's argument raises, I seek to shed light on whether and, if so, how criticisms of a Cartesian conception of thought may be extended to the philosophy of perception. (shrink)

Dummett's objections to the coherence of the strict finitist philosophy of mathematics are thus, at the present time at least, ill-taken. We have so far no definitive treatment of Sorites paradoxes; so no conclusive ground for dismissing Dummett's response — the response of simply writing off a large class of familiar, confidently handled expressions as semantically incoherent. I believe that cannot be the right response, if only because it threatens to open an unacceptable gulf between the insight into his own (...) understanding available to a philosophically reflective speaker and the conclusions available to one confined to observing the former's linguistic practice; for an observer of our linguistic practice could never justifiably arrive at the conclusion that ‘red’, ‘child’, etc., are governed by inconsistent rules. But the Sorites is not the subject of this paper. The points I hope to have made plausible are: that a generalized intuitionist position cannot be so much as formulated and that even a most local intuitionism, argued for the special case of arithmetic, is hard pressed effectively to stabilize and defend itself; that strict finitism remains the natural outcome of the anti-realism which Dummett has propounded by way of support for the intuitionist philosophy of mathematics; that it is powerfully buttressed by the ideas of the latter Wittgenstein on rule-following; and that there is no extant compelling reason to suppose that its involvement with predicates of surveyability calls its coherence into question. The correct philosophical assessment of strict finitism, and its proper mathematical exegesis, remain absolutely open, almost virgin issues. This is not a situation which philosophers of mathematics should tolerate very much longer. (shrink)

The postulation by the “epistemic” theory of vagueness of a cut-off point between heaps and non-heaps has made it seem incredible. Surely, the critics argue, a vague predicate doesn’t divide the universe into a set and its complement. I argue in response that an objection of a similar kind can be leveled against most theories of vagueness. The only two which avoid it are untenable. The objection is less compelling than it initially seems. However, even when this obstacle is removed, (...) the epistemic theory is not yet vindicated. (shrink)

Disagreeing with most authors on vagueness, the author proposes a solution that he calls ‘three-valued semantic pluralism’ to the age-old sorites paradox. In essence, it is a three-valued semantics for a first-order vague language with identity with the additional suggestion that a vague language has more than one correct interpretation. Unlike the traditional three-valued approach to a vague language, three-valued semantic pluralism can accommodate the phenomenon of higher-order vagueness and the phenomenon of penumbral connection when equipped with ‘suitable conditionals’. The (...) author also shows that three-valued semantic pluralism is a natural consequence of a restricted form of the Tolerance principle ) and a few related ideas, and argues that ) is well-motivated by considerations about how we learn, teach, and use vague predicates. (shrink)

In ‘Something to Do with Vagueness ...’, Linda Burns defends an analogy between the informational and the borderline-case variety of vagueness. She argues that the latter is in fact less extraordinary and less disastrous than people in the tradition of Michael Dummett and Crispin Wright have told us. However, her account involves presuppositions that cannot be taken for granted. Here is to take a closer look at some of these presuppositions and argue hat they may--when left unguarded--undermine much of Burns’ (...) general account. (shrink)

Some have argued that the vagueness exhibited by geographic names and descriptions such as ‘Albuquerque’, ‘the Outback’, or ‘Mount Everest’ is ultimately ontological: these terms are vague because they refer to vague objects, objects with fuzzy boundaries. I take the opposite stand and hold the view that geographic vagueness is exclusively semantic, or conceptual at large. There is no such thing as a vague mountain. Rather, there are many things where we conceive a mountain to be, each with its precise (...) boundary, and when we say ‘Everest’ we are just being vague as to which thing we are referring to. This paper defends this view against some plausible objections. (shrink)

In ‘Something to Do with Vagueness ...’, Linda Burns defends an analogy between the informational and the borderline-case variety of vagueness. She argues that the latter is in fact less extraordinary and less disastrous than people in the tradition of Michael Dummett and Crispin Wright have told us. However, her account involves presuppositions that cannot be taken for granted. Here is to take a closer look at some of these presuppositions and argue hat they may—when left unguarded—undermine much of Burns’ (...) general account. (shrink)

In ‘Something to Do with Vagueness ...’, Linda Burns defends an analogy between the informational and the borderline-case variety of vagueness. She argues that the latter is in fact less extraordinary and less disastrous than people in the tradition of Michael Dummett and Crispin Wright have told us. However, her account involves presuppositions that cannot be taken for granted. Here we take a closer look at some of these presuppositions and argue that they may—when left unguarded—undermine much of Burns’ general (...) account. (shrink)

As far as ‘modern’ logical theories of vagueness are concerned, a main distinction can be drawn between ‘semantical’ ones and ‘pragmatical’ ones. The latter are defended here, because they tend to retake into account important contextual dimensions of the problem abandoned by the former. Their inchoate condition seems not alarming, since they are of surprisingly recent date. This, however, could very well be an accidental explanation. That is, the true reason for it might sooner or later turn out to be (...) bearing exactly on the fundamental human limitations, when it comes to theorizing, that these approaches are urging us to appreciate. (shrink)

This paper defends a pragmatical approach to vagueness. The vagueness-adaptive logic VAL is a good reconstruction of and an excellent, instrument for human reasoning processes in which vague predicates are involved. Apart from its proof-theory and semantics, a Sorites-treating model based on it is presented, disarming the paradox. The paper opens perspectives with respect to the construction of theories by means of vague predicates.

The question of the moral relevance of the individual demand is fundamental to many purchase decisions of daily consumer life. Can a single purchase make a difference for the better or worse? Each individual consumer could argue that companies are unlikely to adjust their production due to one single item more or less being sold. He might therefore decide not to change his consumption behavior but instead to rely on the effort of others, a pattern commonly referred to as collective (...) action problem. In this article, we study collective action problems with regard to everyday purchase situations. We base our discussion on Shelly Kagan’s famous article “Do I make a difference?” and critically discuss a central assumption of his model: the symmetric relationship between supply and demand. We find that Kagan’s solution to collective action problems is not true a priori but has to be evaluated in certain empirical surroundings. We therefore discuss the approach in the context of the European meat market and demonstrate that Kagan’s argument does not provide a universal solution to cases of meat purchasing. We conclude with an outlook regarding the role of consumer ethics. (shrink)

A solution to the sorites paradox is obtained by distinguishing three formats of the sorites argument and appraising them in the light of four fundamental considerations: (i) the appropriate notion of truth for the application of vague predicates to their borderline cases, (ii) a certain construal of borderline cases, (iii) a certain freedom of use of vague terms not enjoyed by non-Vague terms and (iv) the revocation of that freedom by deductive contexts.

In this paper, we present a simple overview of the main non classical logics proposed for dealing with the Sorites paradox, that is, weakly paracomplete logics, weakly paraconsistent, and type 1 fuzzy logics. We note some of their advantages and problems and we suggest that the problems can be at least partially overcome by adopting a solution which relies on interval based type 2 fuzzy logics.

Wright holds that the following two theses are jointly incoherent: Rules determine correct language use. These rules are discoverable via internal reflection on language use. I argue that incoherence is derivable from alone and examine two types of probabilistic accounts that model a modification of, one in terms of inexact knowledge, the other in terms of viewing semantic rules as reasons for linguistic actions. Both accommodate tolerance by breaking the link between justified assertion and truth, but incoherence threatens their conception (...) of justified assertion. I argue that the rules-as-reasons approach can relocate sharp boundaries to a place where they are not only more tolerable, but to be expected. (shrink)

This paper presents and defends a definition of vagueness, compares it favourably with alternative definitions, and draws out some consequences of accepting this definition for the project of offering a substantive theory of vagueness. The definition is roughly this: a predicate 'F' is vague just in case for any objects a and b, if a and b are very close in respects relevant to the possession of F, then 'Fa' and 'Fb' are very close in respect of truth. The definition (...) is extended to cover vagueness of many-place predicates, of properties and relations, and of objects. Some of the most important advantages of the definition are that it captures the intuitions which motivate the thought that vague predicates are tolerant, without leading to contradiction, and that it yields a clear understanding of the relationships between higher-order vagueness, sorites susceptibility, blurred boundaries, and borderline cases. The most notable consequence of the definition is that the correct theory of vagueness must countenance degrees of truth. (shrink)

I argue that there can be no such thing as a borderline case of the predicate ‘phenomenally conscious’: for any given creature at any given time, it cannot be vague whether that creature is phenomenally conscious at that time. I first defend the Positive Characterization Thesis, which says that for any borderline case of any predicate there is a positive characterization of that case that can show any sufficiently competent speaker what makes it a borderline case. I then appeal to (...) the familiar claim that zombies are conceivable, and I argue that this claim entails that there can be no positive characterizations of borderline cases of ‘phenomenally conscious’. By the Positive Characterization Thesis, it follows that ‘phenomenally conscious’ can not have any borderline cases. (shrink)

This paper demarcates a theoretically interesting class of "evaluational adjectives." This class includes predicates expressing various kinds of normative and epistemic evaluation, such as predicates of personal taste, aesthetic adjectives, moral adjectives, and epistemic adjectives, among others. Evaluational adjectives are distinguished, empirically, in exhibiting phenomena such as discourse-oriented use, felicitous embedding under the attitude verb `find', and sorites-susceptibility in the comparative form. A unified degree-based semantics is developed: What distinguishes evaluational adjectives, semantically, is that they denote context-dependent measure functions ("evaluational (...) perspectives")—context-dependent mappings to degrees of taste, beauty, probability, etc., depending on the adjective. This perspective-sensitivity characterizing the class of evaluational adjectives cannot be assimilated to vagueness, sensitivity to an experiencer argument, or multidimensionality; and it cannot be demarcated in terms of pretheoretic notions of subjectivity, common in the literature. I propose that certain diagnostics for "subjective" expressions be analyzed instead in terms of a precisely specified kind of discourse-oriented use of context-sensitive language. I close by applying the account to `find x PRED' ascriptions. (shrink)

Un argument en faveur de l'infaillibilité a priori est considéré puis rejeté. Il s'agit de critiquer un argument de type cartésien visant à fonder la connaissance de soi sur un type privilégié de rapport épistémique. On montre que plusieurs catégories d'énoncés psychologiques à la première personne ne peuvent donner lieu à un tel savoir infaillible. La discussion culmine sur l'examen du Cogito. Il est démontré que le philosophe cartésien ne peut savoir a priori qu'il pense puisqu'il ne peut savoir a (...) priori que chaque inscription en lui de la forme verbale « Je pense » constitue un acte intentionnel de penser.An argument favourable to a priori infallibility is considered and then rejected. Specifically, it is a cartesian argument which purports to justify infallible self-knowledge on the basis of a special epistemic access. Many first person psy- chological sentences are shown to be defective in this respect. The discussion culminates with an examination of the Cogito. It is shown that the cartesian philosopher cannot claim to know a priori that he is thinking since he does not know a priori that all inscriptions in himself of the verbal form "I think" constitute an intentional act of thinking. (shrink)

The non-transitivity of the relation looks the same as has been used to argue that the relation has the same phenomenal character as is non-transitive—a result that jeopardizes certain theories of consciousness. In this paper, I argue against this conclusion while granting the premise by dissociating lookings and phenomenology; an idea that some might find counter-intuitive. However, such an intuition is left unsupported once phenomenology and cognitive access are distinguished from each other; a distinction that is conceptually and empirically grounded.

Of the dozens of purported solutions to the liar paradox published in the past fifty years, the vast majority are "traditional" in the sense that they reject one of the premises or inference rules that are used to derive the paradoxical conclusion. Over the years, however, several philosophers have developed an alternative to the traditional approaches; according to them, our very competence with the concept of truth leads us to accept that the reasoning used to derive the paradox is sound. (...) That is, our conceptual competence leads us into inconsistency. I call this alternative the inconsistency approach to the liar. Although this approach has many positive features, I argue that several of the well-developed versions of it that have appeared recently are unacceptable. In particular, they do not recognize that if truth is an inconsistent concept, then we should replace it with new concepts that do the work of truth without giving rise to paradoxes. I outline an inconsistency approach to the liar paradox that satisfies this condition. (shrink)

The intransitivity of matching sensible qualities of color isa threat not only to the sense-data theory, but to allrealist theories of sensible qualities, including thecurrent leading realist theory: representationalism.I save representationalism from this threat by way ofa novel yet empirically plausible hypothesis about theintrospective classification of sensible qualities of color.I argue that due to limitations of the visual system's abilityto extract fine-grained information about color fromthe environment, introspective classification of sensiblequalities of color is sensitive to features of context.I finish by (...) arguing for the superiority of mysolution over two alternative solutions: one by NelsonGoodman, the other by C.L. Hardin. (shrink)

This paper sketches an understanding of conflation and vagueness according to which the latter is a special kind of the former. First, I sketch a particular understanding of conflation. Then, I go on to argue that vague concepts fit directly into this understanding. This picture of vagueness is related, but not identical, to a number of existing accounts.

The distinction between rules and similarity is central to our understanding of much of cognitive psychology. Two aspects of existing research have motivated the present work. First, in different cognitive psychology areas we typically see different conceptions of rules and similarity; for example, rules in language appear to be of a different kind compared to rules in categorization. Second, rules processes are typically modeled as separate from similarity ones; for example, in a learning experiment, rules and similarity influences would be (...) described on the basis of separate models. In the present article, I assume that the rules versus similarity distinction can be understood in the same way in learning, reasoning, categorization, and language, and that a unified model for rules and similarity is appropriate. A rules process is considered to be a similarity one where only a single or a small subset of an object's properties are involved. Hence, rules and overall similarity operations are extremes in a single continuum of similarity operations. It is argued that this viewpoint allows adequate coverage of theory and empirical findings in learning, reasoning, categorization, and language, and also a reassessment of the objectives in research on rules versus similarity. Key Words: categorization; cognitive explanation; language; learning; reasoning; rules; similarity. (shrink)

I defend, to a certain extent, the traditional view that perceptual indiscriminability is non-transitive. The argument proceeds by considering important recent work by Benj Hellie: Hellie argues that colour perception represents ‘inexactly’, and that this results in violations of the transitivity of colour indiscriminability. I show that Hellie’s argument remains inconclusive, since he does not demonstrate conclusively that colour perception really does represent inexactly. My own argument for the non-transitivity of perceptual indiscriminability uses inexactness instead as one horn of a (...) dilemma: the key idea is that there is a class of perceptual experiences which might plausibly be supposed either to represent inexactly or to represent exactly—but which demonstrate the non-transitivity of perceptual indiscriminability either way. (shrink)

A utility-based approach to the understanding of vague predicates (VPs) is proposed. It is argued that assignment of truth values to propositions containing VPs entails unjustifiable assumptions of consensus; two models of VP semantics are criticized on this basis: (1) the super-truth theory of Kit Fine (1975), which requires an unlikely consensus on base points; (2) the fuzzy logic of Lotfi Zadeh (1975), on fuzzy truth values of sentences. Pragmatism is held to provide a key: successful behavior justifies a person's (...) knowledge of the content of a VP. Instead of attempting to determine a consensus underlying successful communication, the utility of individual communications is held to rest on sufficient approximation of meanings between people. 3 Figures, 17 References. Adapted from the source document. (shrink)

The idea of higher-order vagueness is usually associated with conceptions of vagueness that focus on the existence of borderline cases. What sense can be made of it within a conception of vagueness that focuses on tolerance instead? A proposal is offered here. It involves understanding ‘definitely’ not as a sentence operator but as a predicate modifier, and more precisely as an intensifier, that is, an operator that shifts the predicate extension along a scale. This idea is combined with the author’s (...) earlier approach to the semantics of vague expressions, which builds on the idea of a central gap associated with a predicate. The central gap approach is generalized to handle arbitrarily many iterations of ‘definitely’. (shrink)

This paper argues that the traditional characterization of the notion of paradox — an apparently valid argument with apparently true premises and an apparently false conclusion — is too narrow; there are paradoxes that do not satisfy it. After discussing, and discarding, some alternatives, an outline of a new characterization of the notion of paradox is presented. A paradox is found to be an apparently valid argument such that, apparently, it does not present the kind of commitment to the conclusion (...) that should be implied by an acceptance of the truth of the premises and the validity of the argument. (shrink)

One of the few points of agreement between most theists and non-theists working on the problem of evil is that the existence of a perfect God is incompatible with the existence of pointless evil. In a series of influential papers, however, Peter van Inwagen has argued that careful attention to the reasoning behind this claim reveals fatal difficulties related to the Sorites Paradox. In this paper, I explain van Inwagen’s appeal to sorites reasoning, distinguish between two different arguments in his (...) work, and argue that they both commit the same so-far-unnoticed mistake. (shrink)

In this paper, I raise an objection to Philip Goff’s “Revelation Thesis” as articulated in his Consciousness and Fundamental Reality. In Sect. 1 I present the Revelation Thesis in the context of Goff’s broader defence of pan-psychism. In Sect. 2 I argue that the Revelation Thesis entails the identity of indiscriminable phenomenal properties. In Sect. 3 I argue that the identity of indiscriminable phenomenal properties is false. The upshot is that the Revelation Thesis is false.

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 (...) is impossible, so we must reject the spectrum arguments. (shrink)

Epistemicism is the view that seemingly vague predicates are not in fact vague. Consequently, there must be a sharp boundary between a man who is bald and one who is not bald. Although such a view is often met with incredulity, my aim is to provide a defense of epistemicism in this essay. My defense, however, is backhanded: I argue that the formal commitments of epistemicism are the result of good practical reasoning, not metaphysical necessity. To get to that conclusion, (...) I spend most of the essay arguing that using a formal system like classical logic to manage seemingly vague situations requires practical principles to mediate between the formalism and what it aims to represent. (shrink)

Suppose you're unable to discriminate the colors of two objects. According to the triangulation view, their colors might nonetheless look different to you, and that's something you can discover as a result of further comparisons. The primary motivation for this view is its apparent ability to solve a puzzle involving a series of pairwise indiscriminable objects. I argue that, due to visual noise, the triangulation view doesn't really solve the puzzle.

According to anti-atomism, we represent color properties (e.g., red) in virtue of representing color relations (e.g., redder than). I motivate anti-atomism with a puzzle involving a series of pairwise indistinguishable chips. I then develop two versions of anti-atomism.