The Fallacy of Misplaced Vagueness - VoegelinView.com

This is a beautiful book. It traces the history of philosophical work on vagueness, evaluates the main contemporary treatments of the subject, and advances the view that vagueness is ignorance, supporting this position by a detailed account of the notion of inexactness in knowledge.

Devitt/Philosophy, 2006

There is a philosophical problem of vagueness because of various conceptual puzzles to which vagueness gives rise. The most famous of these puzzles is the sorites paradox, and it very quickly leads to all the other semantical and logical puzzles associated with vagueness. 'Sorites' derives from the Greek word for heap, 'soros', and the original paradox turned on the vagueness of that word, but paradoxes of the same kind can be generated for virtually any vague concept, and sorites paradox is now used as a label for any paradox of that kind. For example, a sorites paradox is generated by the following inference, which I'll call SI:

Philosophical Studies, 2007

This paper presents an new epistemicist account of vagueness, one that avoids standard arbitrariness worries by exploiting a plenitudinous metaphysic. There are two natural objections to epistemicist accounts of vagueness that one frequently encounters in conversation (objections that are frequently run together). 1 One objection is that it is hard to live without an informative answer to the question as to how the non-semantic facts-non-relational and relational-about a given individual determine the semantic profile of that individual. Let us call this the Bruteness worry. A second objection is that it seems metaphysically arbitrary that just one of the many candidate cut-offs for, say, baldness, should be associated with some ordinary pattern of use of the term 'bald'. Let us call this the Arbitrariness worry. In this paper we sketch an epistemicist approach to vagueness that provides a distinctive perspective on these foundational issues. On the one hand, it affords epistemicism protection against the Arbitrariness worry, by combining the evenhandedness typically associated with supervaluationism with the logic and semantics distinctive of epistemicism. 2 And on the other, it renders the Bruteness objection less pressing by assimilating it to a kind of bruteness that many of us have

Physics of life review, 2019

Comment Rethinking the abstract/concrete concepts dichotomy Comment on "Words as social tools: Language, sociality and inner grounding in abstract concepts" by Anna M. Borghi et al.

Nous, 2000

In his "Vagueness and Partial Belief" 1 Stephen Schiffer claims that to solve the philosophical problem of vagueness is to solve the sorites paradox and to explicate the notion of a borderline case. He holds that vagueness is a psychological notion, and aims to offer an explanation of borderline cases that makes no semantic, epistemic, or metaphysical claims. He offers two reasons for taking vagueness to be a psychological notion:~a! a psychological status better explains the no-fact-ofthe-matter intuition many have about vague propositions, when compared to the epistemic and semantic theorists @p. 233#; and, b! propositions are not ontologically and conceptually independent of us, they're products of our linguistic and conceptual practices, they're mind and language created entities that exist all right. 2 Schiffer introduces a new notion of vague-related partial belief VPB, which differs from the notion of standard-related partial belief in that VPB is not required to obey the probability theory axioms. 3 Later, he recasts VPB as VPB* and defines the notion of a borderline case in terms of VPB*.

Analysis, 1996

According to the epistemic conception of vagueness defended in Williamson 1994, what we use vague terms to say is true or false, but in borderline cases we cannot know which. Our grasp of what we say does not open its truth-value to our view. Crispin Wright 1995 offers a lively critique of this conception. A reply may help to clarify the issues.' The first point to note is that epistemicism is not a denial that our terms are vague; it is a theory about what their acknowledged vagueness consists in. Me all recognize examples of vagueness when we encounter them in borderline cases; we can then go on to construct alternative hypotheses as to the underlying nature of the phenomenon. Wright acknowledges this point, for he credits epistemicism with '[tlhe merit [. . .] of bringing out that the ordinary idea of genuine semantic indeterminacy is not itself a datum, but a proto-theory of data' (134, Wright's emphasis). Unfortunately, some of his criticisms neglect the point. For example, he takes the epistemicist to hold that 'when I intend that you should stand roughly here, [...I the demarcation of the range of cases in which you would comply from that in which you would not is already perfectly precise' (155, Wright's emphasis; other such remarks occur on 153 and 155). Precision is the absence of vagueness. On the epistemic view, 'Stand roughly here' is a vague request, not a precise one, but its vagueness is an epistemic matter. Our understanding of it is such that we cannot know where we cease to comply with it. Even the metaphor of vague concepts as blurred shadows (133) can be interpreted epistemically. Fortunately, Wright's main arguments do not depend on this misstatement; they must now be addressed. Part of the case for epistemicism is an explanation of our inability to know whether vague terms apply in borderline cases (Williamson 1994: 21647). It uses independently motivated principles about knowledge. Suppose that x judges truly that P. If x could too easily have judged falsely by the same method, then x has judged truly only by luck, and x does not know that P.2 Contrapositively, if x does know that P, then x could not too * I will ignore Wright's criticisms of Roy Sorensen's arguments for epistemicism, to which Sorensen replies in his 1995.

Nous, 1999

philosophy.stanford.edu

2003

Philosophical studies, 2004