ABSTRACT: This paper argues that the so-called paradoxes of higher-order vagueness are the result of a confusion between higher-order vagueness and the distribution of the objects of a Sorites series into extensionally non-overlapping non-empty classes.

Most descriptions of higher-order vagueness in terms of traditional modal logic generate so-called higher-order vagueness paradoxes. The one that doesn't is problematic otherwise. Consequently, the present trend is toward more complex, non-standard theories. However, there is no need for this.In this paper I introduce a theory of higher-order vagueness that is paradox-free and can be expressed in the first-order extension of a normal modal system that is complete with respect to single-domain Kripke-frame semantics. This is the system (...) QS4M+BF+FIN. It corresponds to the class of transitive, reflexive and final frames. With borderlineness defined logically as usual, it then follows that something is borderline precisely when it is higher-order borderline, and that a predicate is vague precisely when it is higher-order vague.Like Williamson's, the theory proposed here has no clear borderline cases in Sorites sequences. I argue that objections that there must be clear borderline cases ensue from the confusion of two notions of borderlineness—one associated with genuine higher-order vagueness, the other employed to sort objects into categories—and that the higher-order vagueness paradoxes result from superimposing the second notion onto the first. Lastly, I address some further potential objections. (shrink)

There is a trade-off between specificity and accuracy in existing models of belief. Descriptions of agents in the tripartite model, which recognizes only three doxastic attitudes—belief, disbelief, and suspension of judgment—are typically accurate, but not sufficiently specific. The orthodox Bayesian model, which requires real-valued credences, is perfectly specific, but often inaccurate: we often lack precise credences. I argue, first, that a popular attempt to fix the Bayesian model by using sets of functions is also inaccurate, since it requires us to (...) have interval-valued credences with perfectly precise endpoints. We can see this problem as analogous to the problem of higher order vagueness. Ultimately, I argue, the only way to avoid these problems is to endorse Insurmountable Unclassifiability. This principle has some surprising and radical consequences. For example, it entails that the trade-off between accuracy and specificity is in-principle unavoidable: sometimes it is simply impossible to characterize an agent’s doxastic state in a way that is both fully accurate and maximally specific. What we can do, however, is improve on both the tripartite and existing Bayesian models. I construct a new model of belief—the minimal model—that allows us to characterize agents with much greater specificity than the tripartite model, and yet which remains, unlike existing Bayesian models, perfectly accurate. (shrink)

A discussion on this so debatable and debated concept, Higher Order Vagueness. After going through the issues that make Higher Order Vagueness an object of scientific attention, we conclude that vagueness is undesirable in logical systems but desirable in language, and the Semiotics Universe splits into three other universes inside of the universe of the Computer Science Systems. We create a new way of addressing problems with sigmatoids, and define vagueness in an almost mathematical fashion.

This paper deals with higher-order vagueness in Williamson's 'logic of clarity'. Its aim is to prove that for 'fixed margin models' (W,d,α ,[ ]) the notion of higher-order vagueness collapses to second-order vagueness. First, it is shown that fixed margin models can be reformulated in terms of similarity structures (W,~). The relation ~ is assumed to be reflexive and symmetric, but not necessarily transitive. Then, it is shown that the structures (W,~) come along with naturally defined maps (...) h and s that define a Galois connection on the power set PW of W. These maps can be used to define two distinct boundary operators bd and BD on W. The main theorem of the paper states that higher-order vagueness with respect to bd collapses to second-order vagueness. This does not hold for BD, the iterations of which behave in quite an erratic way. In contrast, the operator bd defines a variety of tolerance principles that do not fall prey to the sorites paradox and, moreover, do not always satisfy the principles of positive and negative introspection. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: Stewart Shapiro recently argued that there is no higher-order vagueness. More specifically, his thesis is: (ST) ‘So-called second-order vagueness in ‘F’ is nothing but first-order vagueness in the phrase ‘competent speaker of English’ or ‘competent user of “F”’. Shapiro bases (ST) on a description of the phenomenon of higher-order vagueness and two accounts of ‘borderline case’ and provides several arguments in its support. We present the phenomenon (as Shapiro describes it) and the accounts; then discuss (...) Shapiro’s arguments, arguing that none is compelling. Lastly, we introduce the account of vagueness Shapiro would have obtained had he retained compositionality and show that it entails true higher-order vagueness. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to challenge some widespread assumptions about the role of the modal axiom 4 in a theory of vagueness. In the context of vagueness, axiom 4 usually appears as the principle ‘If it is clear (determinate, definite) that A, then it is clear (determinate, definite) that it is clear (determinate, definite) that A’, or, more formally, CA → CCA. We show how in the debate over axiom 4 two different notions of clarity are (...) in play (Williamson-style "luminosity" or self-revealing clarity and concealeable clarity) and what their respective functions are in accounts of higher-order vagueness. On this basis, we argue first that, contrary to common opinion, higher-order vagueness and S4 are perfectly compatible. This is in response to claims like that by Williamson that, if vagueness is defined with the help of a clarity operator that obeys axiom 4, higher-order vagueness disappears. Second, we argue that, contrary to common opinion, (i) bivalence-preservers (e.g. epistemicists) can without contradiction condone axiom 4 (by adopting what elsewhere we call columnar higher-order vagueness), and (ii) bivalence-discarders (e.g. open-texture theorists, supervaluationists) can without contradiction reject axiom 4. Third, we rebut a number of arguments that have been produced by opponents of axiom 4, in particular those by Williamson. (The paper is pitched towards graduate students with basic knowledge of modal logic.). (shrink)

This paper is an expanded written version of my reply to Rosanna Keefe’s paper ‘Modelling higher-order vagueness: columns, borderlines and boundaries’ (Keefe 2015), which in turn is a reply to my paper ‘Columnar higher-order vagueness, or Vagueness is higher-order vagueness’ (Bobzien 2015). Both papers were presented at the Joint Session of the the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association in July, 2015. At the Joint Session meeting, there was insufficient time to present all of my points (...) in response to Keefe’s paper. In addition, the audio of the session, which is available online, becomes inaudible at the beginning of my reply to Keefe’s comments due to a technical defect. The following is a full version of my remarks. (shrink)

It is generally supposed that borderline cases account for the tolerance of vague terms, yet cannot themselves be sharply bounded, leading to infinite levels of higher order vagueness. This higher order vagueness subverts any formal effort to make language precise. However, it is possible to show that tolerance must diminish at higher orders. The attempt to derive it from indiscriminability founders on a simple empirical test, and we learn instead that there is no limit to how small higher (...) order tolerance may become. That means there is no limit to how precisely we may draw the boundaries of borderline cases, thus forestalling any requirement for higher order vagueness. (shrink)

This paper discusses Fara's so-called 'Paradox of Higher-Order Vagueness' concerning supervaluationism. In the paper I argue that supervaluationism is not committed to global validity, as it is largely assumed in the literature, but to a weaker notion of logical consequence I call 'regional validity'. Then I show that the supervaluationist might solve Fara's paradox making use of this weaker notion of logical consequence. The paper is discussed by Delia Fara in the same volume.

Philosophers disagree about whether vagueness requires us to admit truth-value gaps, about whether there is a gap between the objects of which a given vague predicate is true and those of which it is false on an appropriately constructed sorites series for the predicate---a series involving small increments of change in a relevant respect between adjacent elements, but a large increment of change in that respect between the endpoints. There appears, however, to be widespread agreement that there is some (...) sense in which vague predicates are gappy which may be expressed neutrally by saying that on any appropriately constructed sorites series for a given vague predicate there will be a gap between the objects of which the predicate is denitely true and those of which it is denitely false. Taking as primitive the operator ‘it is denitely the case that’, abbreviated as ‘D’, we may stipulate that a predicate F is denitely true (or denitely false) of an object just in case ‘DF (a)’, where a is a name for the object, is true (or false) simpliciter.1 This yields the following conditional formulation of a ‘gap principle’: (D Φ (x) ∧ D¬ Φ (y)) → ¬R(x, y). Here ‘ Φ ’ is to be replaced with a vague predicate, while ‘R’ is to stand for a sorites relation for that predicate: a relation that can be used to construct a sorites series for the predicate---such as the relation of being just one millimetre shorter than for the predicate ‘is tall’. Disagreements about the sense in which it is correct to say that vague predicates are gappy can then be recast as disagreements about how to understand the denitely operator. One might give it, for example, a pragmatic construal such as ‘it would not be misleading to assert that’; or an epistemic construal such as ‘it is known that’ or ‘it is knowable that’; or a semantic construal such as ‘it is true that’. (shrink)

This paper intends to further the understanding of the formal properties of (higher-order) vagueness by connecting theories of (higher-order) vagueness with more recent work in topology. First, we provide a “translation” of Bobzien's account of columnar higher-order vagueness into the logic of topological spaces. Since columnar vagueness is an essential ingredient of her solution to the Sorites paradox, a central problem of any theory of vagueness comes into contact with the modern mathematical theory of topology. (...) Second, Rumfitt’s recent topological reconstruction of Sainsbury’s theory of prototypically defined concepts is shown to lead to the same class of spaces that characterize Bobzien’s account of columnar vagueness, namely, weakly scattered spaces. Rumfitt calls these spaces polar spaces. They turn out to be closely related to Gärdenfors’ conceptual spaces, which have come to play an ever more important role in cognitive science and related disciplines. Finally, Williamson’s “logic of clarity” is explicated in terms of a generalized topology (“locology”) that can be considered an alternative to standard topology. Arguably, locology has some conceptual advantages over topology with respect to the conceptualization of a boundary and a borderline. Moreover, in Williamson’s logic of clarity, vague concepts with respect to a notion of a locologically inspired notion of a “slim boundary” are (stably) columnar. Thus, Williamson’s logic of clarity also exhibits a certain affinity for columnar vagueness. In sum, a topological perspective is useful for a conceptual elucidation and unification of central aspects of a variety of contemporary accounts of vagueness. (shrink)

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 (...) so-called paradoxes of higher-order vagueness. We offer a proposal that makes strides on both issues. We argue that the intuitionist’s characteristic rejection of any third alethic value alongside true and false is best elaborated by taking the normal modal system S4M to be the sentential logic of the operator ‘it is clearly the case that’. S4M opens the way to an account of higher-order vagueness which avoids the paradoxes that have been thought to infect the notion. S4M is one of the modal counterparts of the intuitionistic sentential calculus and we use this fact to explain why IPC is the correct sentential logic to use when reasoning with vague statements. We also show that our key results go through in an intuitionistic version of S4M. Finally, we deploy our analysis to reply to Timothy Williamson’s objections to intuitionistic treatments of vagueness. (shrink)

In this paper I investigate an alternative to imprecise probabilism. Imprecise probabilism is a popular revision of orthodox Bayesianism: while the orthodox Bayesian claims that a rational agent’s belief-state can be represented by a single credence function, the imprecise probabilist claims instead that a rational agent’s belief-state can be represented by a set of such functions. The alternative that I put forward in this paper is to claim that the expression ‘credence’ is vague, and then apply the theory of supervaluationism (...) to sentences containing this expression. This gives us a viable alternative to imprecise probabilism, and I end by comparing the two accounts. I show that supervaluationism has a simpler way of handling sentences relating the belief-states of two different people, or of the same person at two different times; that both accounts may have the resources to develop plausible decision theories; and finally that the supervaluationist can accommodate higher-order vagueness in a way that is not available to the imprecise probabilist. (shrink)

Epistemicism about vagueness is the view that vagueness, or indeterminacy, is an epistemic matter. Truthmaker-gap epistemicism is the view that indeterminate truths are indeterminate because their truth is not grounded by any worldly fact. Both epistemicism in general and truthmaker-gap epistemicism originated in Roy Sorensen's work on vagueness. My aim in this paper is to give a characterization of truthmaker-gap epistemicism and argue that the view is incompatible with higher-order vagueness: vagueness in whether some case (...) of the form ‘it is determinate that A’ or ‘it is indeterminate whether A’ is true. Since it is highly likely that there is higher-order vagueness, truthmaker-gap epistemicism is in an uncomfortable position. (shrink)

In this dissertation, I argue that vagueness is a metaphysical phenomenon---that properties and objects can be vague---and propose a trivalent theory of vagueness meant to account for the vagueness in the world. In the first half, I argue against the theories that preserve classical logic. These theories include epistemicism, contextualism, and semantic nihilism. My objections to these theories are independent of considerations of the possibility that vagueness is a metaphysical phenomenon. However, I also argue that these (...) theories are not capable of accommodating metaphysical vagueness. As I move into my positive theory, I first argue for the possibility of metaphysical vagueness and respond to objections that charge that the world cannot be vague. One of these objections is Gareth Evans' much-disputed argument that vague identities are impossible. I then describe what I call the logic of states of affairs. The logic of states of affairs has as its atomic elements states of affairs that can obtain, unobtain, or be indeterminate. Finally, I argue that the logic of states of affairs is a better choice for a theory of vagueness than other logics that could accommodate metaphysical vagueness such as supervaluationism and degree theories. Preference should be given to the logic of states of affairs because it provides a better explanation of higher-order vagueness and does a better job of matching our ordinary understandings of logical operators than supervaluationism does and because it provides a more general account of indeterminacy than the account given by degree theories. Advisor: Reina Hayaki. (shrink)

If there are fundamental laws of nature, can they fail to be exact? In this paper, I consider the possibility that some fundamental laws are vague. I call this phenomenon 'fundamental nomic vagueness.' I characterize fundamental nomic vagueness as the existence of borderline lawful worlds and the presence of several other accompanying features. Under certain assumptions, such vagueness prevents the fundamental physical theory from being completely expressible in the mathematical language. Moreover, I suggest that such vagueness (...) can be regarded as 'vagueness in the world.' For a case study, we turn to the Past Hypothesis, a postulate that (partially) explains the direction of time in our world. We have reasons to take it seriously as a candidate fundamental law of nature. Yet it is vague: it admits borderline (nomologically) possible worlds. An exact version would lead to an untraceable arbitrariness absent in any other fundamental laws. However, the dilemma between fundamental nomic vagueness and untraceable arbitrariness is dissolved in a new quantum theory of time's arrow. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: Recently a bold and admirable interpretation of Chrysippus’ position on the Sorites has been presented, suggesting that Chrysippus offered a solution to the Sorites by (i) taking an epistemicist position1 which (ii) made allowances for higher-order vagueness. In this paper I argue (i) that Chrysippus did not take an epistemicist position, but − if any − a non-epistemic one which denies truth-values to some cases in a Sorites-series, and (ii) that it is uncertain whether and how he made (...) allowances for higher-order vagueness, but if he did, this was not grounded on an epistemicist position. (shrink)

Is 'vague' vague? Is the meaning of 'true' vague? Is higher-order vagueness unavoidable? Is it possible to say precisely what it is to say something precisely? These questions, deeply interrelated and of fundamental importance to logic and semantics, have been addressed recently by Achille Varzi in articles focused on an ingenius attempt by Roy Sorensen ("An Argument for the Vagueness of 'Vague'") to demonstrate that 'vague' is vague.

A number of authors have objected to the application of non-classical logic to problems in philosophy on the basis that these non-classical logics are usually characterised by a classical metatheory. In many cases the problem amounts to more than just a discrepancy; the very phenomena responsible for non-classicality occur in the field of semantics as much as they do elsewhere. The phenomena of higher order vagueness and the revenge liar are just two such examples. The aim of this paper (...) is to show that a large class of non-classical logics are strong enough to formulate their own model theory in a corresponding non-classical set theory. Specifically I show that adequate definitions of validity can be given for the propositional calculus in such a way that the metatheory proves, in the specified logic, that every theorem of the propositional fragment of that logic is validated. It is shown that in some cases it may fail to be a classical matter whether a given sentence is valid or not. One surprising conclusion for non-classical accounts of vagueness is drawn: there can be no axiomatic, and therefore precise, system which is determinately sound and complete. (shrink)

Many classically valid meta-inferences fail in a standard supervaluationist framework. This allegedly prevents supervaluationism from offering an account of good deductive reasoning. We provide a proof system for supervaluationist logic which includes supervaluationistically acceptable versions of the classical meta-inferences. The proof system emerges naturally by thinking of truth as licensing assertion, falsity as licensing negative assertion and lack of truth-value as licensing rejection and weak assertion. Moreover, the proof system respects well-known criteria for the admissibility of inference rules. Thus, supervaluationists (...) can provide an account of good deductive reasoning. Our proof system moreover brings to light how one can revise the standard supervaluationist framework to make room for higher-order vagueness. We prove that the resulting logic is sound and complete with respect to the consequence relation that preserves truth in a model of the non-normal modal logic _NT_. Finally, we extend our approach to a first-order setting and show that supervaluationism can treat vagueness in the same way at every order. The failure of conditional proof and other meta-inferences is a crucial ingredient in this treatment and hence should be embraced, not lamented. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: This paper offers a generic revenge-proof solution to the Sorites paradox that is compatible with several philosophical approaches to vagueness, including epistemicism, supervaluationism, psychological contextualism and intuitionism. The solution is traditional in that it rejects the Sorites conditional and proposes a modally expressed weakened conditional instead. The modalities are defined by the first-order logic QS4M+FIN. (This logic is a modal companion to the intermediate logic QH+KF, which places the solution between intuitionistic and classical logic.) Borderlineness is introduced modally (...) as usual. The solution is innovative in that its modal system brings out the semi-determinability of vagueness. Whether something is borderline and whether a predicate is vague or precise is only semi-determinable: higher-order vagueness is columnar. Finally, the solution is based entirely on two assumptions. (1) It rejects the Sorites conditional. (2) It maintains that if one specifies borderlineness in terms of the ‒suitably interpreted‒ modal logic QS4M+FIN, then one can explain why the Sorites appears paradoxical. From (1)+(2) it results that one can tell neither where exactly in a Sorites series the borderline zone starts and ends nor what its extension is. Accordingly, the solution is also called agnostic. (shrink)

One of the hardest problems in philosophy, one that has been around for over two thousand years without generating any significant consensus on its solution, involves the concept of vagueness: a word or concept that doesn't have a perfectly precise meaning. There is an argument that seems to show that the word or concept simply must have a perfectly precise meaning, as violently counterintuitive as that is. Unfortunately, the argument is usually so compressed that it is difficult to see (...) why exactly the problem is so hard to solve. In this article I attempt to explain just why it is that the problem – the sorites paradox – is so intractable.Export citation. (shrink)

This article argues that resolutions to the sorites paradox offered by epistemic and supervaluation theories fail to adequately account for vagueness. After explaining the paradox, I examine the epistemic theory defended by Timothy Williamson and discuss objections to his semantic argument for vague terms having precise boundaries. I then consider Rosanna Keefe's supervaluationist approach and explain why it fails to accommodate the problem of higher-order vagueness. I conclude by discussing how fuzzy logic may hold the key to resolving (...) the sorites paradox without positing indefensible borders to the correct application of vague terms. (shrink)

The PhD thesis advances a new approach to vagueness as dispersion, comparing it with the main philosophical theories of vagueness in the analytic tradition.

A number of Bayesians claim that, if one has no evidence relevant to a proposition P, then one's credence in P should be spread over the interval [0, 1]. Against this, I argue: first, that it is inconsistent with plausible claims about comparative levels of confidence; second, that it precludes inductive learning in certain cases. Two motivations for the view are considered and rejected. A discussion of alternatives leads to the conjecture that there is an in-principle limitation on formal representations (...) of belief: they cannot be both fully accurate and maximally specific. (shrink)

We often get evidence that bears on the reliability of some of our own first-order reasoning. The rational response to such “higher-order” evidence would seem to depend on a rational assessment of how reliable we can expect that reasoning to be, in light of the higher-order evidence. “Independence” principles are intended to constrain this reliability-assessment, so as to prevent question-begging reliance on the very reasoning being assessed. However, extant formulations of Independence principles tend to be vague or ambiguous, and coming (...) up with a tolerably precise formulation turns out to be tricky. This paper aims to make some progress toward developing a more precise Independence principle, and also to highlight some of the difficulties the project entails. The hope is to take a step toward understanding how rational belief is informed by evidence bearing on agents’ cognitive reliability. (shrink)

What the world needs now is another theory of vagueness. Not because the old theories are useless. Quite the contrary, the old theories provide many of the materials we need to construct the truest theory of vagueness ever seen. The theory shall be similar in motivation to supervaluationism, but more akin to many-valued theories in conceptualisation. What I take from the many-valued theories is the idea that some sentences can be truer than others. But I say very different (...) things to the ordering over sentences this relation generates. I say it is not a linear ordering, so it cannot be represented by the real numbers. I also argue that since there is higher-order vagueness, any mapping between sentences and mathematical objects is bound to be inappropriate. This is no cause for regret; we can say all we want to say by using the comparative truer than without mapping it onto some mathematical objects. From supervaluationism I take the idea that we can keep classical logic without keeping the familiar bivalent semantics for classical logic. But my preservation of classical logic is more comprehensive than is normally permitted by supervaluationism, for I preserve classical inference rules as well as classical sequents. And I do this without relying on the concept of acceptable precisifications as an unexplained explainer. The world does not need another guide to varieties of theories of vagueness, especially since Timothy Williamson (1994) and Rosanna Keefe (2000) have already provided quite good guides. I assume throughout familiarity with popular theories of vagueness. (shrink)

The conclusion of this chapter is that higher-order vagueness is universal: no sentence whatsoever is definitely true, definitely definitely true, definitely definitely definitely true, and so on ad infinitum. The argument, of which there are several versions, turns on the existence of Sorites sequences of possible worlds connecting the actual world to possible worlds where a given sentence is used in such a way that its meaning is very different. The chapter attempts to be neutral between competing accounts of (...) the nature of vagueness and definiteness. (shrink)

Higher-order defeat occurs when one loses justification for one's beliefs as a result of receiving evidence that those beliefs resulted from a cognitive malfunction. Several philosophers have identified features of higher-order defeat that distinguish it from familiar types of defeat. If higher-order defeat has these features, they are data an account of rational belief must capture. In this article, I identify a new distinguishing feature of higher-order defeat, and I argue that on its own, and in conjunction with the other (...) distinguishing features, it favors an account of higher-order defeat grounded in non-evidential, ‘state-given reasons’ for belief. (shrink)

Higher-order realists about properties express their view that there are properties with the help of higher-order rather than first-order quantifiers. They claim two types of advantages for this way of formulating property realism. First, certain gridlocked debates about the nature of properties, such as the immanentism versus transcendentalism dispute, are taken to be dissolved. Second, a further such debate, the tropes versus universals dispute, is taken to be resolved. In this paper I first argue that higher-order realism does not in (...) fact resolve the tropes versus universals dispute. In a constructive spirit, I then develop higher-order realism in a way that leads to a dissolution, rather than a resolution, of this dispute too. (shrink)

Recent authors have drawn attention to a new kind of defeating evidence commonly referred to as higher-order evidence. Such evidence works by inducing doubts that one’s doxastic state is the result of a flawed process – for instance, a process brought about by a reason-distorting drug. I argue that accommodating defeat by higher-order evidence requires a two-tiered theory of justification, and that the phenomenon gives rise to a puzzle. The puzzle is that at least in some situations involving higher-order defeaters (...) the correct epistemic rules issue conflicting recommendations. For instance, a subject ought to believe p, but she ought also to suspend judgment in p. I discuss three responses. The first resists the puzzle by arguing that there is only one correct epistemic rule, an Über-rule. The second accepts that there are genuine epistemic dilemmas. The third appeals to a hierarchy or ordering of correct epistemic rules. I spell out problems for all of these responses. I conclude that the right lesson to draw from the puzzle is that a state can be epistemically rational or justified even if one has what looks to be strong evidence to think that it is not. As such, the considerations put forth constitute a non question-begging argument for a kind of externalism. (shrink)

You have higher-order uncertainty iff you are uncertain of what opinions you should have. I defend three claims about it. First, the higher-order evidence debate can be helpfully reframed in terms of higher-order uncertainty. The central question becomes how your first- and higher-order opinions should relate—a precise question that can be embedded within a general, tractable framework. Second, this question is nontrivial. Rational higher-order uncertainty is pervasive, and lies at the foundations of the epistemology of disagreement. Third, the answer is (...) not obvious. The Enkratic Intuition---that your first-order opinions must “line up” with your higher-order opinions---is incorrect; epistemic akrasia can be rational. If all this is right, then it leaves us without answers---but with a clear picture of the question, and a fruitful strategy for pursuing it. (shrink)

This chapter provides an introduction to higher-order metaphysics as well as to the contributions to this volume. We discuss five topics, corresponding to the five parts of this volume, and summarize the contributions to each part. First, we motivate the usefulness of higher-order quantification in metaphysics using a number of examples, and discuss the question of how such quantifiers should be interpreted. We provide a brief introduction to the most common forms of higher-order logics used in metaphysics, and indicate a (...) number of questions which can be raised in such systems using logical vocabulary alone. Using a further example, we return to applications of higher-order logics in metaphysics. We also mention key developments in the history of higher-order logic as it pertains to metaphysics. Finally, we mention certain arguments which have been raised against the use of higher-order logic, and some ways of responding to them. (shrink)

This paper is a study of higher-order contingentism – the view, roughly, that it is contingent what properties and propositions there are. We explore the motivations for this view and various ways in which it might be developed, synthesizing and expanding on work by Kit Fine, Robert Stalnaker, and Timothy Williamson. Special attention is paid to the question of whether the view makes sense by its own lights, or whether articulating the view requires drawing distinctions among possibilities that, according to (...) the view itself, do not exist to be drawn. The paper begins with a non-technical exposition of the main ideas and technical results, which can be read on its own. This exposition is followed by a formal investigation of higher-order contingentism, in which the tools of variable-domain intensional model theory are used to articulate various versions of the view, understood as theories formulated in a higher-order modal language. Our overall assessment is mixed: higher-order contingentism can be fleshed out into an elegant systematic theory, but perhaps only at the cost of abandoning some of its original motivations. (shrink)

Ambitious higher-order theories of consciousness aim to account for conscious states when these are understood in terms of what-it-is-like-ness. This paper considers two arguments concerning this aim, and concludes that ambitious theories fail. The misrepresentation argument against HO theories aims to show that the possibility of radical misrepresentation—there being a HO state about a state the subject is not in—leads to a contradiction. In contrast, the awareness argument aims to bolster HO theories by showing that subjects are aware of all (...) their conscious states. Both arguments hinge on how we understand two related notions which are ubiquitous in discussions of consciousness: those of what-it-is-like-ness and there being something it is like for a subject to be in a mental state. This paper examines how HO theorists must understand the two crucial notions if they are to reject the misrepresentation argument but assert the awareness argument. It shows that HO theorists can and do adopt an understanding—the HO reading—which seems to give them what they want. But adopting the HO reading changes the two arguments. On this reading, the awareness argument tells us nothing about those states there is something it is like to be in, and so offers no support to ambitious HO theories. And to respond to the misrepresentation understood according to the HO reading is to simply ignore the argument presented, and so to give no response at all. As things stand, we should deny that HO theories can account for what-it-is-like-ness. (shrink)

Subverting a once widely held Quinean paradigm, there is a growing consensus among philosophers of logic that higher-order quantifiers (which bind variables in the syntactic position of predicates and sentences) are a perfectly legitimate and useful instrument in the logico-philosophical toolbox, while neither being reducible to nor fully explicable in terms of first-order quantifiers (which bind variables in singular term position). This article discusses the impact of this quantificational paradigm shift on metaphysics, focussing on theories of properties, propositions, and identity, (...) as well as on the metaphysics of modality. (shrink)

The paper proposes an account of the rational response to higher‐order evidence whose key claim is that whenever we acquire such evidence we ought to engage in the inquiring activity of double‐checking. Combined with a principle that establishes a connection between rational inquiry and rational belief retention, the account offers a novel explanation of the alleged impermissibility of retaining one's belief in the face of higher‐order evidence. It is argued that this explanation is superior to the main competitor (...) view which appeals to the notion of defeat. (shrink)

It has recently been argued that a sensitivity theory of knowledge cannot account for intuitively appealing instances of higher-order knowledge. In this paper, we argue that it can once careful attention is paid to the methods or processes by which we typically form higher-order beliefs. We base our argument on what we take to be a well-motivated and commonsensical view on how higher-order knowledge is typically acquired, and we show how higher-order knowledge is possible in a sensitivity theory once this (...) view is adopted. (shrink)

Evidentialism is the thesis, roughly, that one’s beliefs should fit one’s evidence. The enkratic principle is the thesis, roughly, that one’s beliefs should "line up" with one’s beliefs about which beliefs one ought to have. While both theses have seemed attractive to many, they jointly entail the controversial thesis that self-misleading evidence is impossible. That is to say, if evidentialism and the enkratic principle are both true, one’s evidence cannot support certain false beliefs about which beliefs one’s evidence supports. Recently, (...) a number of epistemologists have challenged the thesis that self-misleading evidence is impossible on the grounds that misleading higher-order evidence does not have the kind of strong and systematic defeating force that would be needed to rule out the possibility of such self-misleading evidence. Here I respond to this challenge by proposing an account of higher-order defeat that does, indeed, render self-misleading evidence impossible. Central to the proposal is the idea that higher-order evidence acquires its normative force by influencing which conditional beliefs it is rational to have. What emerges, I argue, is an independently plausible view of higher-order evidence, which has the additional benefit of allowing us to reconcile evidentialism with the enkratic principle. (shrink)

This paper concerns would-be necessary connections between doxastic attitudes about the epistemic statuses of your doxastic attitudes, or ‘higher-order epistemic attitudes’, and the epistemic statuses of those doxastic attitudes. I will argue that, in some situations, it can be reasonable for a person to believe p and to suspend judgment about whether believing p is reasonable for her. This will set the stage for an account of the virtue of intellectual humility, on which humility is a matter of your higher-order (...) epistemic attitudes. Recent discussions in the epistemology of disagreement have assumed that the question of the proper response to disagreement about p concerns whether you ought to change your doxastic attitude towards p. My conclusion here suggests an alternative approach, on which the question of the proper response to disagreement about p concerns the proper doxastic attitude to adopt concerning the epistemic status of your doxastic attitude towards p.Send article to KindleTo send this article to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.HIGHER-ORDER EPISTEMIC ATTITUDES AND INTELLECTUAL HUMILITYVolume 9, Issue 3Allan HazlettDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/epi.2012.11Your Kindle email address Please provide your Kindle [email protected]@kindle.com Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Dropbox To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox. HIGHER-ORDER EPISTEMIC ATTITUDES AND INTELLECTUAL HUMILITYVolume 9, Issue 3Allan HazlettDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/epi.2012.11Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Google Drive To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive. HIGHER-ORDER EPISTEMIC ATTITUDES AND INTELLECTUAL HUMILITYVolume 9, Issue 3Allan HazlettDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/epi.2012.11Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Export citation Request permission. (shrink)

In post-Gricean pragmatics, communication is said to be successful when a hearer recovers a speaker’s intended message. On this assumption, proposals for ‘what is said’ – the semantic, propositional meaning of a speaker’s utterance – are typically centred around the content the speaker aimed to communicate. However, these proposals tend not to account for the fact that speakers can be deliberately vague, leaving no clear proposition to be recovered, or that a speaker can accept a hearer’s misconstrual even though the (...) speaker didn’t intend it. In such cases, identifying ‘what is said’ is more contentious, even though communication is arguably no less successful. Building on recent interactionist approaches to meaning, this chapter offers a proposal for ‘what is said’ that can account for cases of ‘imperfect’ communication in which the recovery of a speaker’s intention goes awry. This involves taking ‘what is said’ as the co-constructed meaning that the speaker and hearer jointly agree on, giving ‘grounded meanings’ – those mutually and manifestly accepted into the discourse by speaker and hearer – higher precedence in a theory of communication than simply the speaker’s intended meaning. In such cases, rather than speaker and hearer converging at the level of explicit utterance content, communication is expected to be successful as long as the hearer recovers a proposition which is compatible with the speaker’s higher-order discursive goal. The hearer’s uptake is then allowed to override the content of the speaker’s intended meaning in the process of negotiating ‘what is said’. (shrink)

A critical survey of recent work in epistemology on higher-order evidence. It discusses the nature of higher-order evidence, some puzzles it raises, responses to those puzzles, and problems facing them. It concludes by indicating connections between debates concerning higher-order evidence in epistemology and parallel debates in ethics and aesthetics.

On at least one of its uses, ‘higher-order evidence’ refers to evidence about what opinions are rationalized by your evidence. This chapter surveys the foundational epistemological questions raised by such evidence, the methods that have proven useful for answering them, and the potential consequences and applications of such answers.

Emotional states of consciousness, or what are typically called emotional feelings, are traditionally viewed as being innately programed in subcortical areas of the brain, and are often treated as different from cognitive states of consciousness, such as those related to the perception of external stimuli. We argue that conscious experiences, regardless of their content, arise from one system in the brain. On this view, what differs in emotional and non-emotional states is the kind of inputs that are processed by a (...) general cortical network of cognition, a network essential for conscious experiences. Although subcortical circuits are not directly responsible for conscious feelings, they provide non-conscious inputs that coalesce with other kinds of neural signals in the cognitive assembly of conscious emotional experiences. In building the case for this proposal, we defend a modified version of what is known as the higher-order theory of consciousness. (shrink)

The principle of universal instantiation plays a pivotal role both in the derivation of intensional paradoxes such as Prior’s paradox and Kaplan’s paradox and the debate between necessitism and contingentism. We outline a distinctively free logical approach to the intensional paradoxes and note how the free logical outlook allows one to distinguish two different, though allied themes in higher-order necessitism. We examine the costs of this solution and compare it with the more familiar ramificationist approaches to higher-order logic. Our assessment (...) of both approaches is largely pessimistic, and we remain reluctantly inclined to take Prior’s and Kaplan’s derivations at face value. (shrink)

Two expressive limitations of an infinitary higher-order modal language interpreted on models for higher-order contingentism – the thesis that it is contingent what propositions, properties and relations there are – are established: First, the inexpressibility of certain relations, which leads to the fact that certain model-theoretic existence conditions for relations cannot equivalently be reformulated in terms of being expressible in such a language. Second, the inexpressibility of certain modalized cardinality claims, which shows that in such a language, higher-order contingentists cannot (...) express what is communicated using various instances of talk of ‘possible things’, such as ‘there are uncountably many possible stars’. (shrink)

Thinking about misleading higher-order evidence naturally leads to a puzzle about epistemic rationality: If one’s total evidence can be radically misleading regarding itself, then two widely-accepted requirements of rationality come into conflict, suggesting that there are rational dilemmas. This paper focuses on an often misunderstood and underexplored response to this (and similar) puzzles, the so-called conflicting-ideals view. Drawing on work from defeasible logic, I propose understanding this view as a move away from the default metaepistemological position according to which rationality (...) requirements are strict and governed by a strong, but never explicitly stated logic, toward the more unconventional view, according to which requirements are defeasible and governed by a comparatively weak logic. When understood this way, the response is not committed to dilemmas. (shrink)

It seems obvious that when higher-order evidence makes it rational for one to doubt that one’s own belief on some matter is rational, this can undermine the rationality of that belief. This is known as higher-order defeat. However, despite its intuitive plausibility, it has proved puzzling how higher-order defeat works, exactly. To highlight two prominent sources of puzzlement, higher-order defeat seems to defy being understood in terms of conditionalization; and higher-order defeat can sometimes place agents in what seem like epistemic (...) dilemmas. This chapter draws attention to an overlooked aspect of higher-order defeat, namely that it can undermine the resilience of one’s beliefs. The notion of resilience was originally devised to understand how one should reflect the ‘weight’ of one’s evidence. But it can also be applied to understand how one should reflect one’s higher-order evidence. The idea is particularly useful for understanding cases where one’s higher-order evidence indicates that one has failed in correctly assessing the evidence, without indicating whether one has over- or underestimated the degree of evidential support for a proposition. But it is exactly in such cases that the puzzles of higher-order defeat seem most compelling. (shrink)

The higher-order thought (HOT) theory of consciousness is a reductive representational theory of consciousness which says that what makes a mental state conscious is that there is a suitable HOT directed at that mental state. Although it seems that any neural realization of the theory must be somewhat widely distributed in the brain, it remains unclear just how widely distributed it needs to be. In section I, I provide some background and define some key terms. In section II, I argue (...) against the view that HOT theory should treat first-order (i.e. world-directed) conscious states as requiring prefrontal cortical activity though it is reasonable to suppose that conscious states are realized in the brain. In section III, I then explore some of the key background metaphysical issues involved in understanding the nature of consciousness, such as the debate between realism and idealism as well as the prospects for solving the so-called “hard problem” of consciousness. Some of the differences in question often mirror the traditional differences between Western and Eastern perspectives on the nature of consciousness. Overall, I argue that some form of realism and physicalism is more plausible than the opposing views. I also argue that materialists (and especially HOT theorists) can offer plausible replies to the hard problem. (shrink)