Challenging, with several powerful arguments, some of our deepest beliefs about rationality, morality, and personal identity, Parfit claims that we have a false view about our own nature. It is often rational to act against our own best interersts, he argues, and most of us have moral views that are self-defeating. We often act wrongly, although we know there will be no one with serious grounds for complaint, and when we consider future generations it is very hard to avoid conclusions (...) that most of us will find very disturbing. (shrink)

If you’ve read the first five hundred pages of this book, you’ve read most of it (we assume that ‘most’ requires more than ‘more than half’). The set of natural numbers n such that the first n pages are most of this book is nonempty. Therefore, by the least number principle, it has a least member k. What is k? We do not know. We have no idea how to find out. The obstacle is something about the term ‘most’. It (...) is recognisably the same feature as the feature of ‘heap’ that prevents us from finding an answer to the question ‘How many grains make a heap?’ and the feature of many other expressions that prevents us from finding answers to similar questions involving them. Call this feature, whatever its underlying nature, vagueness. (shrink)

The central thesis of the book is that the proposition a vague sentence expresses in a borderline case is true or false, and we cannot know which. We are ignorant of its truth-value. This is the epistemic view of vagueness. It allows us to preserve both classical logic and disquotational principles about truth and falsity, with all their advantages: simplicity, clarity, power, past success, integration with well-confirmed theories in other domains. Consequently, the epistemic view has a head start over its (...) rivals. The gap is widened by each rival theory's specific disadvantages, many of them related to higher-order vagueness. The epistemic view is then strengthened by an explanation of our ignorance in borderline cases. The explanation predicts higher order vagueness. (shrink)

The central thesis of the book is that the proposition a vague sentence expresses in a borderline case is true or false, and we cannot know which. We are ignorant of its truth-value. This is the epistemic view of vagueness. It allows us to preserve both classical logic and disquotational principles about truth and falsity, with all their advantages: simplicity, clarity, power, past success, integration with well-confirmed theories in other domains. Consequently, the epistemic view has a head start over its (...) rivals. The gap is widened by each rival theory's specific disadvantages, many of them related to higher-order vagueness. The epistemic view is then strengthened by an explanation of our ignorance in borderline cases. The explanation predicts higher order vagueness. (shrink)

This paper develops the treatment of vague predicates begun in my "Vagueness Without Paradox" (Philosophical Review 103, 1 [1994]). In particular, I show how my account of vague words dissolves an "eternal" version of the sorites paradox, i.e., a version in which the paradox is generated independently of any particular run of judgments of the items in a sorites series. In so doing I refine the notion of an internal contest, introduced in the earlier paper, and draw a distinction within (...) the class of internal contexts between contexts of judgment and contexts of consideration. (shrink)