Meeting notes 6/30/09

A recommendation for coming up with a theory of ontic/metaphysical vagueness: look at Heck's queasy notion that an Indefinitist holds that vagueness is ``ineradicable." Look at Williamson's Definitely* and Definitely! operators. The idea is that these super-strength operators validate S4 or S5, which are needed for Evans's proof to go through. (NB: one or the other of S4 or S5! Must establish which!)

Is the indefinitist response viable in the face of these super-strength operators? Heck notes that a ``trivial falsum operator" eradicates (higher-order) vagueness, but this is not a problem for the Indefinitist. Why? Hard to say...intuitively, because the trivial falsum operator obliterates information. Could the super-strength operators obliterate information too? (Is anyone definitely* tall? Fuzzy logic accounts of Definitely and Definitely*, vs. more pragmatic accounts, and supervaluation accounts.)

A thought. Consider the analogue of Definitely* for Lewis's modal realism a la PL. This would be the transitive closure [S4 or S5?] of the counterpart relation. Lewis says this is simply uninteresting. [``Could Humphrey have been a poached egg? Could this ship have been that ship?, etc.] Why couldn't it be simply uninteresting for us as well? A loss of information is how one can characterize the problem with point-blank persistence questions?

Stating the obvious

van Inwagen writes in Material Beings that his metaphysical thesis that there are no chairs is compatible with what the folk, speaking colloquially, say when they say there are chairs.

``This is because the ordinary man does not, in the normal course of events, say things like `There are tables'; rather, he says things like `Some of my tables are antiques.'" (from Tye's review)

Likewise, Vann McGee, an all-purpose defender of classical logic, notes (in conversation) that people never assert tautologies. In fact, he seems to hold something even stronger: ordinary language is compatible with classical logic even though it's the case that speakers are sometimes hesitant to assent to tautologies and even explicitly deny them. A case in point is speakers' hesitancy with LEM and Bivalence when confronted with vague borderline cases.

This is tough. By such lights speakers cannot even set up a prima facie presumption that

1. There are chairs.

or

2. I am neither thin nor not thin. (``She is and she isn't.")

At least with regards to van Inwagen, it certainly does seem fairer to be Lewis-like (PW) in conceding that one's theory ``disagrees extravagantly with commonsense notions of what there is." The dynamic is surely that people rarely say things that they find obvious. But this is not really a license to deny the obvious!

Then again: Tye makes the interesting, surely true, point in his review of van Inwagen that our everyday concepts like chair have no necessary and sufficient conditions of application. Does this mean that every reductive analysis is doomed to fail? This doesn't seem fair to reductive projects.

...``The result is that (2c) is not equivalent to (1). This result is not, I think, suprising: reductive paraphrases, like badly worn tires, tend to develop leaks in new places shortly after their old leaks are patched.

I am not, then, persuaded...where van Inwagen first goes wrong is in supposing, as many have before him, that it is possible to construct a reductive analysis of material object parthood. Our concepts generally do not have necessary and sufficient conditions. I see no reason to believe that this case is any different."

Barnes notes: on chasing one's tail

My goal is to give an account of vague objects without taking a stand on every unresolved question in the vagueness literature. (Because my goal is to give an account of vague objects, and it is beyond the scope of any single project to solve, or take a stand on, every unresolved question in the vagueness literature.)

Barnes's definition of ontic vagueness is what she calls ``negative": it holds simply that ontic vagueness is vagueness which is neither epistemic nor semantic.

This seems unhelpful, but how else to cash out the notion that vagueness is metaphysical? Barnes argues convincingly that she is in a sort of bind.

Arguing for vague objects without a reductive theory of vagueness looks like self-defeating mystery-mongering, especially because we have no clear prior ordinary-language notion of a vague object.

``These [canonical] explanations of vagueness are reductive--they explain vagueness in terms of something more familiar. It's unclear whether the ontic theorist can provide an analogous explanation. A negative definition...certainly doesn't do the job.

But it's far from obvious that the ontic theorist should be expected to provide such explanations. We need a definition of ontic vagueness that's general enough to frame debate...Semantic and epistemic theories can do this reductively. But this is largely because these theories have their reductive ambitions built into them: quite naturally. semantic theories reduce to facts about truth and epistemic theories reduce to facts about knowledge. But contrast, the metaphysician has no obvious reductive basis...More importantly, in contrast to rival theories of vagueness it's plausible that ontic vagueness should be taken as a metaphysical primitive--just as some theories maintain that tense or modality are primitive." (Barnes)

Arguing for vague objects with a reductive theory of vagueness is pointless and misleading. This is what I called the ``oblique" reading of the metaphysicalist thesis:

"The best sense that the canonical view can make of the metaphysicalist's position is an oblique reading of her thesis, according to which a ``vague object'' is one which is especially apt or prone to being given a vague name (see for example McGee 1998, ftnote 3). There is something about Rachel Alexandra---namely, her speed---which explains why photographs of her are blurry. But she is not, except in an unhelpfully obscure sense, any kind of `blurry object.'"

This is less than ambitious.

What's needed is to chart the ground between a substantive theory of vagueness and a ``minimal theory" which is acceptable to all parties. Even candidates for minimal theories that claim to be more inclusive than their rivals acknowledge that they rule out metaphysical vagueness out of hand (see esp. Weatherson, VAI.) Can a ``substantive" theory be nonreductionist? Surely Lewis shows the way!...

Forbes writes in his review of PL that

``There is a significant problem which might be called `the problem of the analysis of modality', but it seems not to be one which is addressed in the present dispute; this is the problem of what makes something possible or necessary. If one asks, `What makes it necessary that there are no married bachelors?', Lewis's answer, `Because in no world is there a married bachelor', is rather unilluminating...If the latter [explanation] should be in agreement with the definition [of the word ``bachelor"], that would seem to be a kind of accident. So if what I would regard as being the real problem about the analysis of modality--what grounds the truth of a true modal statement?--is being addressed at all, it seems to me not to be well-addressed."

Lycan is harsher, arguing that when Lewis accuses ersatzisms of relying on notions of primitive modality, he is hoisted by his own petard.

``The question of primitive modality is tricky. I know of no actualist who has been able to dispense with it (my own modal primitive is `compatible' as applied to pairs of properties.) But, if every actualist is stuck with some modal primitive, so, I would say, is Lewis. The flesh-and-bloodiness of his worlds might be thought to relieve him of the need for the sort of abstraction indulged in by actualists, and so it does; but Lewis mobilizes a modal primitive nonetheless. It is `world.' `World' for him has to mean `possible world' since the very flesh-and-bloodiness aforementioned prevents him from admitting impossibilia. Some sets of sentences describe `worlds' and so do not; but Lewis cannot make that distinction in any definite way without dragging in some modal primitive or other."

Point-blank questions

Point-blank questions about modality are annoying and pointless:

1. Could Hubert Humphrey have been a poached egg?

(1) would never come up in ordinary conversation, and there is no ordinary-seeming answer to it. Perhaps the answer is hopelessly interest-relative, and hopelessly context-sensitive. Point-blank questions about persistence are equally annoying and pointless:

2. If a witch turns Humprey into a poached egg, is the egg still Humphrey?

Nonetheless, interesting questions about persistence and modality can still be asked, while avoiding these fruitless ones. (1) and (2) taken together suggest these hard (or bad) questions persistence and modality are intertranslatable. So if you think it's possible to do interesting work in modality, or to use modal concepts in various philosophical analyses, even if you can't answer (1), you ought to think the same about persistence. Likewise, if you think, as most do, that there is modality de re, there should be persistence de re.

Perhaps we can go further and try to say why we don't know the answer to (1). The nearest possible world where Humphrey is a poached egg is still very far away from the actual world. There is no simple experiment we could run to make such a world actual, no qualitatively similar event we could look to for precedent, etc. Thus it is reasonable to be modest about our ability to know such things: to possess knowledge regarding these modally ``distant" reaches of logical space.

What are the consequences of these (not very revolutionary) observations for the notion of a rigid designator? Assume, with orthodoxy, that ``Hubert Humphrey" is a rigid designator, meaning that it designates the same object in every possible world. Even if we do assume that, though, we do not know the answer to

3. Does ``Hubert Humphrey" denote a poached egg in some possible world?

(This is, of course, just a way of re-writing (1).) At the far reaches, we do not know what the qualitative properties of things denoted by ``Hubert Humphrey" are. Nonetheless, arguments can and have been advanced to the effect that ``HH" is a rigid designator, without having to explicitly take a stand on the unpromising (3).

The proposal that names are rigid designators puts us in mind of bare particulars and featureless substrates; since we can't think of any necessary properties Nixon has qua Nixon, if ``Nixon" is a rigid designator then the thing it rigidly designates hasn't got any necessary properties. (Is the fact that we can't think of any necessary properties of Nixon qua Nixon actually evidence for ``Nixon"'s being a rigid designator? I'm not sure.) The idea that there are no necessary properties of Nixon is actually a bit weird. Isn't Nixon necessarily alive? Isn't Nixon necessarily concrete (as opposed to abstract?) Also, is there a fixed number of bare particulars in every possible world? Isn't taking sides on this question also a bit fruitless?

But this irresolution concerning the substance of rigid designation shouldn't obscure the fact that the criterion of persistence same mereological sum of elementary particles is extremely implausible. So it is extremely implausible that mereological sums of atoms are the universe's (only) rigid designators. This is so even if it's true that there we can rigidly designate elementary particles (which is a bit odd, since they're all very much the same), and that it's ``ontologically harmless" to generalize to rigidly designating their fusions.

This relates to the options offered to us by Evans's proof that there are no vague objects (1987). The suggested way out is that one of the two singular terms appearing in the first line of the proof is a non-rigid designator. But if we take the atomist's interpretation, why should we conclude that even one of them is a rigid designator? Either way, the proof will fail.