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  1. Intuitionism and the Modal Logic of Vagueness.Susanne Bobzien & Ian Rumfitt - 2020 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 49 (2):221-248.
    Intuitionistic logic provides an elegant solution to the Sorites Paradox. Its acceptance has been hampered by two factors. First, the lack of an accepted semantics for languages containing vague terms has led even philosophers sympathetic to intuitionism to complain that no explanation has been given of why intuitionistic logic is the correct logic for such languages. Second, switching from classical to intuitionistic logic, while it may help with the Sorites, does not appear to offer any advantages when dealing with the (...)
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  2. (1 other version)Objects of Thought.Ian Rumfitt - 2016 - In Gary Ostertag (ed.), Meanings and Other Things: Themes From the Work of Stephen Schiffer. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
    In his book The Things We Mean, Stephen Schiffer advances a subtle defence of what he calls the ‘face-value’ analysis of attributions of belief and reports of speech. Under this analysis, ‘Harold believes that there is life on Venus’ expresses a relation between Harold and a certain abstract object, the proposition that there is life on Venus. The present essay first proposes an improvement to Schiffer’s ‘pleonastic’ theory of propositions. It then challenges the face-value analysis. There will be such things (...)
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  3. (1 other version)Against Harmony.Ian Rumfitt - 1995 - In B. Hale & Crispin Wright (eds.), Blackwell Companion to the Philosophy of Language. Blackwell.
    Many prominent writers on the philosophy of logic, including Michael Dummett, Dag Prawitz, Neil Tennant, have held that the introduction and elimination rules of a logical connective must be ‘in harmony ’ if the connective is to possess a sense. This Harmony Thesis has been used to justify the choice of logic: in particular, supposed violations of it by the classical rules for negation have been the basis for arguments for switching from classical to intuitionistic logic. The Thesis has also (...)
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  4. Tempered pragmatism.Ian Rumfitt - 2016 - In Cheryl Misak & Huw Price (eds.), The Practical Turn: Pragmatism in Britain in the Long Twentieth Century. Oxford: Oup/Ba.
    This paper assesses the prospects of a pragmatist theory of content. I begin by criticising the theory presented in D.H. Mellor’s essay ‘Successful Semantics’. I then identify problems and lacunae in the pragmatist theory of meaning sketched in Chapter 13 of Dummett’s The Logical Basis of Metaphysics. The prospects are brighter, I contend, for a tempered pragmatism, in which the theory of content is permitted to draw upon irreducible notions of truth and falsity. I sketch the shape of such a (...)
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  5. Vagueness and Intuitionistic Logic.Ian Rumfitt - forthcoming - In Alexander Miller (ed.), Language, Logic,and Mathematics: Themes from the Philosophy of Crispin Wright. Oxford University Press.
    In his essay ‘“Wang’s Paradox”’, Crispin Wright proposes a solution to the Sorites Paradox (in particular, the form of it he calls the ‘Paradox of Sharp Boundaries’) that involves adopting intuitionistic logic when reasoning with vague predicates. He does not give a semantic theory which accounts for the validity of intuitionistic logic (and the invalidity of stronger logics) in that area. The present essay tentatively makes good the deficiency. By applying a theorem of Tarski, it shows that intuitionistic logic is (...)
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