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?