Tolerance and Continuity

Continuity is an important aspect of what is going on with phenomenal sorites; I think tolerance might be too.

"a necessary condition on a change looking continuous is that narrow enough regions/close enough points appear to be homogenous [the same color]"? (Graff 924)

This is rejected in favor of a more mathematical definition in terms of epsilons and deltas. Here is the criterion for continuous color-change:

"for change in color across a spectrum to look continuous, it is require only that given any positive amount of change in color, there is a narrow enough width such that in any region on the spectrum narrower than that width, the color looks to change less than that amount in that region. Crucially, it is not required that any region, however narrow, look either homogeneous in color, or the same as its immediate neighbors." (925)

Is this too demanding a notion of continuity for continuous change to be represented in our experience at all?

"It may seem that these conditions would be pretty difficult, if not impossible, to satisfy. If so, so much the better for my case, since it is my opponent's first premise that such conditions can be satisfied." (925)

The dialectic here is that the opponent argues from the continuity of the sorites series to the intransitivity of "looks the same as" via the "homogeneity thesis", which has just been rejected.

Unkind Cuts, and different Sorites desiderata*

Is accepting the existence of a cut in the sorites series, into an extension and an antiextension, just like accepting the arbitrariness of other things in nature--the exact value of the gravitational constant, the maximum amount of money the government would spend to save an endangered child, the exact amount of poison that would kill you dead? Fine (1975) suggests that it is:

"I suspect that the temptation to say that [a sorites sentence] is true may have two causes. The first is that the value of a falsifying n appears to be arbitrary. This arbitrariness has nothing to do with vagueness as such. A similar case, but not involving vagueness, is: if n straws do not break a camel's back, neither do (n+1) straws."

Fara cites this as an attempt to answer "the Psychological Question":

"If the universally generalized sorites sentence is not true, why were we so inclined to accept it in the first place? In other words, what is it about vague predicates that makes them seem tolerant, and hence boundaryless to us?" (50)

She contrasts this with two other questions, "the Semantic Question" and "the Epistemological Question":

Semantic Question. If the universal generalization AxAy(Fx & Rxy -> Fy) is not true, then must this classical equivalent of its negation be true?: ExEy(Fx & Rxy & ~Fy) [called "The Sharp Boundaries Claim"].

(i) if Sharp Boundaries is true, how is its truth compatible with the fact that vague predicates have borderline cases?

(ii) If Sharp Boundaries is NOT true, what revision of classical logic/semantics must be made to accommodate this fact?

Epistemological Question. If AxAy(Fx & Rxy -> Fy) is not true, why are we unable to say which instance is untrue, even in the best epistemic situation?

Graff's response is that active consideration of a case (a particular value of x and y which bear the relation R to each other) raises the similarity of x and y to salience, so the boundary cannot fall between them.

The reason this seems odd to me is that active consideration of two shades seems to make one's ability to discriminate them sharper! This observation is compatible with the claim that one would never draw the F/~F line between them, but since active consideration brings their differences to the fore, it's counterintuitive.

***

Delia Graff Fara, "Shifting Sands." Phil. Topics, 2000.

Kit Fine, "Vagueness, Truth and Logic" Synthese. 1975.

2-dimensionalism: WDTM?

``I...outline a two-dimensional intensional framework for handling a posteriori necessity. Every concept has two intensions, a primary intension and a secondary intension. The primary intension delivers a concept's referent in a centered world when the world is considered as actual (i.e., considered as an epistemic possibility); the secondary intension delivers a concept's referent in a world when it is considered as counterfactual. (The primary intension of ``water" picks out roughly the ``watery stuff" in a world; the secondary intension picks out H2O.) A statement is a priori when it has a necessary primary intension; a statement is necessary when it has a necessary secondary intension but a contingent primary intension. A priori necessities (such as ``water is H2O" have a necessary secondary intension but a contingent primary intension. A statement is conceivable (or logically possible) when its primary intension is true in some world; a statement is possible (metaphysically possible) when its secondary intension is true in some world. So the Kripkean gap between conceivability and possibility is explained at the level of statements, without appealing to a distinction between conceivable and possible worlds. The class of worlds in question is always that of the ideally conceivable (or logically possible) worlds. "

--From Chalmers's precis in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research

Broome and Me*

I want to understand the wide-scoping maneuver and why it fails (if indeed it does). In order to understand this I think I'll need (more) modal logic, but I might also need to understand more about wide-scoping itself.

I think I now understand the intuitive distinction: the "undetachable" O(p->q) is a "normative requirement" which tells you that if you believe p, you ought to believe q. It doesn't mean that p's truth obligates you to believe q.

Intuitively, this does seem to capture what is going on in the miners case: O(A->blA) means that, if we believe that they are in A, we ought to believe we should block A. The truth of their being in A isn't enough to rationally require us to believe we ought to block A, since we might not know where they are, in which case blocking A would be foolhardy.

Here is the paradox in the version which is NOT supposed to be helped by wide-scoping. Part of the key here is that deontically ideal worlds (rel. to a pt. of eval.) are a subset of the epistemically possible worlds (rel. to that pt. of eval.). So MUST(p->q) entails OUGHT(p->q). [Another way of putting this is OUGHT implies CAN. MUST(p) means CANNOT(~p), which entails NOT OUGHT(~p), which entails OUGHT(p).] [Note that this is only true in an unsatisfying sense, though--the unsatisfying sense in which Lincoln ought to have been assassinated, since it is now epistemically necessary that this was so.]

1. O(A -> BlA) Premise (in wide-scoped form)

2. O(B -> BlB) ''

3. M(A v B) Premise: either miners are in A or they are in B

4. M(BlA -> BlO) Blocking A entails blocking one shaft

5. M(BlB -> BlO) ''

6. O(A v B) Must implies ought

7. O(BlA -> BlO) ''

8. O(BlB -> BlO) ''

9. O(BlO) Dilemma, MP, MP [not sure how to write out all the steps that go on inside the scope of the "ought" operator in this kind of notation.]

While turning "ought implies can" into "must implies ought" is a bit fishy, surely the problem here still lies with the fact that step 6 generates only two cases for dilemma. M(A v B), from which (6) is descended, is intended to be taken trivalently: it doesn't decompose into M(A) v M(B). A disjunction may be necessary (or obligatory) without having a necessary (or obligatory) disjunct.

Surely this is the situation that putting "A v B" inside the scope of the O was supposed to prevent!

Could this help to explain why restricting MP is better than using wide-scoping?

***

John Broome, "Normative Requirements" Ratio 1999, XII, 4.

MacFarlane and Kolodny, "Ifs and Oughts," manuscript.

Restricting MP vs. restricting discharging*

Does this difference make a difference?

The inference in question is: p -> D(p)

Contraposition: ~D(p) -> ~p [looks bad!]

Imp: ~p v D(p) [looks bad!]

R-Imp: D(p) v ~p

Evans's revised proof:

~D(a=b) Assume for Red.

F(b) Pred. Abst. (F = property of being indef. = to a)

D(a=a) ? [``identity does not admit of borderline cases"]

~F(a) Pred. Abst.

~(a=b) Leibniz' Law

D~(a=b) ? [many strikes: this is a hyp. context, not clear what justifies the rule anyway, esp. in presence of higher-order vagueness.]

[we have no assumptions, so the conclusion of the proof should be an axiom when the assumption is discharged.]

Heck's way of putting the equivocal result:

``Whether Evans's arguent shows that there can be no vague objects may now seem to be but a terminological question...[It] does show that `~D(a=b)' is unsatisfiable; it does not show that `D(a=b)' is valid. If we identify the view that there are vague objects with the view that there are (or might be) true sentences of the form ~D(a=b), Evans has shown there are no vague objects. If, on the other hand, we identify the view that there a re vague objects with the view that `D(a=b)' is not valid, then he has not."

A much simpler way of making the same point appears to be suggested by McF & K. If MP is not valid, then there's no way to even get close to a contradiction. (By ``close", I mean: to get a contradiction even inside the scope of an assumption that, as it turns out, can't be discharged.)

The McF & K way is to refer us to Restricted MP, which is (always) valid when the antecedent is either world- or info-invariant and the consequent is info-invariant.

The method of evaluating the conditional (``if phi, then psi") is to contract the original information state until it is (i.a) a unique maximal phi-subset or (i.b) until you have one of n maximal phi subsets, in which case you'll need to do step (ii) for all of them; (ii) check that psi is true throughout the remaining i.

Now: let's say p -> D(p) is a rule of inference, in Heck's sense (as opposed to a rule of proof.) It does seem that it is exactly the kind of conditional which is NOT VALID in hypothetical contexts.

Compare Quine's proof, with Nec() and Pos():

Pos(~(9 = num planets)) Assume for red.

F(num pl.) Pred. Abst. (F = prop of pos. being nonidentical 9)

9 = num planets Astronomy

Nec(9=9) premise [axiom, iron law, etc.]

~Pos(~(9=9)) Modal Shift

~F(9) Pred. Abst. (note: both ok bc 9 is rigid desig.)

~F(num planets) Sub. of identicals

F(num pl.) & ~F(num pl.) & Intro

[Contradiction] ~Intro

Do we have an instance of the inference form p -> D(p) here? We do have Nec(9=9), which COULD be gotten from 9=9 and the suspect inference. But the intuition underlying Nec(9=9) isn't that at all. Also, the proof WOULD go through if we had gone from step 3, ``9 = num pl." to something stronger, namely ``Nec(9 = num pl.)" But this wouldn't have been a truth-preserving step. ``p = num pl." is only a contingent identity (if it is an identity at all; perhaps it's more perspicuous to say that it isn't. Instead, the number-of-planets-hood is predicated of 9 in the actual world. It would be off-the-wall to give ``identity doesn't admit of borderline cases" as a justification for such a step.)

Conclusion: the indefinitist case (Heck's terminology) is really stronger than he makes out. Re-interpreting the restriction on rules of inference as a restriction on Modus Ponens (although the two are equivalent in terms of what can be proved) makes Evans's argument look much more insignificant.

****

Heck, ``That there might be vague objects (so far as concerns logic)"

MacFarlane and Kolodny, ``Ifs and Oughts"

Tolerance and the phenomenal sorites

A tolerant object, in my sense of tolerant (the topological one) isn't vague, because, amongst other things, it has no borderline cases: if I pick a (rational) point, it is either definitely inside or definitely outside of the object.*

The sense in which it is tolerant is a different one: there is no last point in the set.

*Graff rejects "admits of borderline cases" as a definition of vagueness because it includes as vague such predicates as "dommel" and Sainsbury's "child*". This is rejecting "admits of borderline cases" as a SUFFICIENT condition for vagueness. Are there complaints about it as a NECESSARY condition? Perhaps only Weatherson (VAI) has challenged that.

What about a set of shades, or a set of heights? It seems that here we return to issues of discriminability and identity. What Graff's other article suggested to me is that indiscriminability is extremely context-sensitive even when the mode of presentation is held fixed. That's why, for example, you bring paint chips home.

We can challenge ourselves when it comes to discriminability. In fact, we can play a game: show me a red thing, and I'll show you an oranger red thing. We can play this game a long time...maybe even forever, if the circumstances were right! And we will never get into the range of things that are definitely orange (and thereby definitely NOT red.) This is particularly true if we're picking points on a spectrum. The experience of the spectrum tells us that for every two points x and y, if x is e.g. on the left of y, then it is orange-er than y. So in those terms, even if there WAS a ``sharp line" dividing the orange things from the red things, we'd still be able to play the game forever.

Could this be what a visual experience of a spectrum tells us? After all, we aren't really sure what it does tell us; we puzzle over the fact that it seems we can only perceive a finite number of shades while being unable to get a fix on just how different two shades need to be to be discriminable. The answer seems to be, "it varies." And the visual experience of the whole spectrum, it seems, gives us more information than that: it tells us precisely that there are an infinite number of shades arranged according to the rule "left of" = "oranger than." There is no limit to the number of ways we can use this information once our visual experience has imparted it to us; we will know that we can always (or almost always) be able to pick an oranger red shade.

Perhaps another test to run is this: if we were given a bunch of tiles, could we arrange them from left to right according to the rule "left of" = "oranger than"? At a fine enough level, the answer would be "no." But just because we cannot do it ourselves does not mean we don't jump to the conclusion that it is correctly done, when we see a color sorites series.

*****

Delia Graff Fara, "Shifting Sands: An Interest-Relative Theory of Vagueness." Phil. Topics

Brian Weatherson, Vagueness as Indeterminacy, manuscript.

Delia Graff Fara, "Phenomenal Continua and the Sorites." Mind, 2001.

Distributing vagueness: shifting the burden from singular to general terms

Orthodoxy has it that vagueness is first and foremost a property of sentences:

(1) That [pointing at my car] is red

or

(2) Bruce is bald. [where Bruce is Bruce Willis]

The vagueness of these sentences is usually analyzed by giving an account of the general terms red and bald, not the singular terms that and Bruce. So any account of vague objects will have to shift the intuitive source of the vagueness of paradigmatically vague sentences from the predicate to the subject. (Williamson suggests the canonical view's tendency to localize vagueness in predicates as a reflection of the `truthmakers are objects' principle, which is really, he says, an unjustifiable dogma.)

It is worth asking why we think that the vagueness of (1) and (2) should be explained by focusing on properties. I suspect the answer is not any insight into, or conviction regarding, the manifest precision of objects (whatever that would be) but rather our strongly-held beliefs about the modal plasticity of Bruce and my car:

(1') My car might have been red.

(2') Bruce might have had abundant hair all his life.

...while Bruce and my car are borderline cases, it is not essential to them that they are. But is the truth of (1') and (2')---which I take for granted---really material to the question of whether there are vague objects? The significance of (1') and (2') should be left an open question pending an account of the relationship between vagueness and modality.

Note also that while we have robust intuitions about the modal plasticity of persons and everyday objects, we generally lack intuitions about the modal profile of properties. While there is talk of vague predicates' being essentially vague, it is not clear what this means; to the extent that it is clear, it is a statement about the predicates' meaning, not their extension. By contrast the intuitions in (1') and (2') are definitely intuitions about the denotation (or extension) of `That' and `Bruce.' This is all the more easily shown given that the current going theory of proper names and demonstratives is that they do not have meanings (`meanings' understood here as Fregean senses.)

Two questions:

(#1) Are all these intuitions about general and singular terms really consistent? If we think of e.g. the predicate blue as the set of blue things, then if you change the color of my blue shirt, you will change the predicate blue...because you change the set of which the shirt is a member, and the identity conditions of sets are given by their members.

So the (1') intuition about the modal plasticity of my car [my car itself, not just the mode of presentation ``Melissa's car"] is equally an intuition about the modal plasticity of blue [blue itself--if such a distinction between the sense and the reference of a general term is even possible!*]

The identity conditions of properties are usually given by modal extensions (c.f. solving the renate-cordate problem.) But, again, that means that one fewer blue object in logical space will change blue into an entirely different property (because it would denote a different set.) Given our limited knowledge of what goes on in the outer reaches of logical space, this is not a very helpful definition of `blue', nor is it one which informs our intuitions about the term. But the fact remains that we are not sure what blue could be like, if it weren't like it is. (Is 2-dimensionalism helpful here?)

(#2) Can I make the same move I made with Sorensen? Here is my cri du coeur:

I just don't think this approach--starting first and foremost with vague sentences and then looking for a suspect to fix the vagueness on--is very profitable. After all, it does not seem to me that sentences are the primary locus of vagueness. The phenomenology of vagueness is something that strikes us when we look at continua: color continua, height spectra, etc. So it is, for example, a feature of color, and only derivatively a feature of sentences with color predicates. At the level of sentential form, we don't have enough information to determine whether ``Tim is pink" is vague. What we need is to see Tim, and to see his color.

This seems right to me even still. I do not think what is really at issue is an enormous debate over what it would mean for a general term to be a rigid designator, etc.

****

*Is it made possible by distinguishing between analytic truths, as McGee does, and truths constituted by use + world?

Sorensen notes: everything's illuminated*

There are vague sentences. Where does ``the vagueness of them" come from? Maybe it comes from the vagueness of the sentences' constituents: this thought would be inspired by the compositionality of sense (and the determination of reference by sense).

On the other hand, vagueness might, like truth-value, be a feature of whole sentences only. One does not attempt to trace e.g. the falsity of sentences to the falsity of one of their constituents (except in the unusual case that the sentence is a conjunction of smaller sentences.) Finally, vagueness might only be a feature of whole sentences in context: see Contextualism about Vagueness.

Sorensen's strategy in his paper is to argue for epistemicism indirectly. What epistemicism says is that vagueness is a certain kind of ignorance with regard to a sentence: it is in the mind of the person who considers the sentence. So it is not a feature of the sentence itself, the sentence at a context, or any of the individual constituents of the sentence (except insofar as my ignorance can be traced to a particular troubling predicate or individual that the sentence uses.) The kind of sentence he considers is identity sentences. This is not because identities are necessary if true (though they are necessary if true) but because identity is ``precise."*

[*I don't really know what this comes to and I am somewhat suspicious of the whole idea. Perhaps it is merely this: identity doesn't admit of borderline cases---where ``borderline case" is not the same as ``contingent case."]

Anyway, Sorensen's argument proceeds by presenting identity sentences where vagueness can be located neither in the sense, nor in the referent of any of the terms. The vagueness of the sentence, then, is independent of the sentence itself. It must be in the distinctive type of ignorance that prevents us from knowing the truth-value of the sentence.

How do we show that the vagueness of the chosen sentence, e.g. ``Acme = Sumo", is not located in the sense or in the referent of any of the terms? (This involves eliminating a lot of possibilities!)

(1) Although it is vague what ``Acme" refers to, this cannot be blamed on anything appearing in the sentence, because the sense which determines the referent does not appear in the proposition. This is the trick of the Dthat's. If the terms in the sentence have any referents at all, they are, in Kaplan's terms, ``pre-loaded":

Acme = Dthat[the first tributary of the river Enigma]

To one who replies that perhaps `Acme' has no referent, Sorensen replies that it must, for two reasons: (i) the disjunction ``Acme is Sumo or Wilt is Sumo" is definitely true; (ii) we can know things about Acme, such as ``Acme is brackish," in virtue of knowing that both Wilt and Sumo are brackish. [reply: wouldn't we think we knew that Acme was self-identical, even if it didn't exist?]

(2) The identity relation does not admit of borderline cases [is this right by the epistemicist's own lights? There is at least one mode of presentation under which the identity relation refuses to admit of borderline cases. But this isn't enough to establish the thesis---unless the epistemicist's idea is that admitting of borderline cases is admitting of borderline cases when conditions are epistemically optimal.]

(3) The only objects in the sentence are riverine bodies, and ``We are [simply] not tempted" here to ascribe the vagueness to the vagueness of these riverine bodies (although, I suppose, they might be vague anyway---can't step in the same one twice, etc.) I would not want to stake a case for the existence of vague objects on a case like this.

****

What to make of this from my own vague-o-phile point of view? I just don't think this approach--starting first and foremost with vague sentences and then looking for a suspect to fix the vagueness on--is very profitable. After all, it does not seem to me that sentences are the primary locus of vagueness. The phenomenology of vagueness is something that strikes us when we look at continua: color continua, height spectra, etc. So it is, for example, a feature of color, and only derivatively a feature of sentences with color predicates. At the level of sentential form, we don't have enough information to determine whether ``Tim is pink" is vague. What we need is to see Tim, and to see his color.

There also seems to be a threat of the different views sliding past each other: vague-o-philes generally prefer sentences of the form ``a is part of b." (Let's say it's vague whether this sentence is true. At least on the notion of parthood inherited from mereology, this notion does not admit of borderline cases. Therefore the vagueness ``must be located" in a itself or b itself.) This shares with the above approach a desire to root out the vagueness of a sentence by quarantining it in one of the sentence's terms. But the two approaches want to focus on two different types of sentences: the first on the form `a = b' and the second on the form `a is part of b.' Prima facie, anyway, each side could be right about its pet sentence-type.

The ``phenomenology first!" response goes like this: we should NOT be looking first and foremost at sentence-types (or sentence-schemata?). We should be looking at the paradigm phenomenology of vagueness. What the phenomenology of vagueness tells us that some predicates (like ``blue," ``tall") are vague, while other predicates (like ``self-identical," ``taller than six feet") are not. So when we turn our attention to vague sentences of the form `Fa,' we should be mindful of the difference that the concrete value of F makes.

Likewise for vague objects. It doesn't really tell us anything to know that the form of the sentence we are studying is ``Fa" or ``a = b" or ``a is part of b". What we conclude, especially in matters of vagueness, may well depend on which a or b is at issue.

Perhaps this complaint is a bit like the contextualist's: it says that we need to know more about how the particular sentence is situated. It is not just that ``Tim is pink" has the form ``Fa." It's that ``Tim is pink" has the form ``Fa" and Tim looks like this: [insert visual experience here.]

* Sorensen, R. "Direct Reference and Vague Identity". Phil. Topics 28:1, Spr. 2000.

Is there a loop?

Is this belief self-fulfilling?

(1) Women are unknown.

I think so, but establishing it is a bit trickier, I think, than establishing Fricker's thesis that

(2) Women are not knowers.

Fricker's analysis makes a suggestion about the reason why (2) is true. With "I" standing for the point of view of society at large, (2) can be expanded to:

(2a) Women are not knowers and I believe they are not knowers.

But social wisdom errs in establishing the direction of fit between the two conjuncts of (2a):

(2b) I believe women are not knowers because they are not knowers.

[Form: I believe p because p.]

(2c) Women are not knowers because I believe they are not knowers.

[Form: p, because I believe p.]

(2b) is false, and (2c) is true, and this is what is often missed. Langton puts the point effectively with regard to the belief that women are submissive:

"[Objectifiers] believe truly that women are submissive, [but] their belief about that belief is false. They believe they believe it because women are submissive. Wrong...women are submissive because they believe it." (288)

The direction of fit is, of course, important because if (2b) is true, then discrimination against women is justified. If (2c) is true, then discrimination against women is not justified.

****

And (1)? It begins with a lack of interest in women. (Old medical literature is probably the best case here, simply because it is so clear and accessible.)

But what is the significance of this?

First, the claim in (1) is severely underspecified.

Something cannot be "known" or "unknown" simpliciter; things are known or unknown by particular agents (at particular times, under particular modes of presentation, etc., etc...)

So let's be clear: the particular agents we are speaking of are Fricker's agents: the agents that constitute society at large. Men, as disproportionally powerful, are disproportionally represented here.

The mode of presentation under which women are known here is...qua women.

So here is the belief:

(1a) Women are unknown and I believe women are unknown.

(1b) I believe women are unknown because women are unknown.

[Form: I believe p because p.]

(1c) Women are unknown because I believe women are unknown.

[Form: p because I believe p.]

There is a substantive question in epistemology regarding whether I can know something despite my belief that I do not know it (to wit: whether 1c is true a priori where p is a statement about my own epistemic states). But resolving this question isn't really necessary here.

The diagnosis from Fricker (and de Beauvoir) is that discriminators engage in projection: they believe they are responding to an objective feature of the world, but really they are making their beliefs true by responding to them as if they were true. So the truth that "women are unknown" (a formulation which implies some cognitive defect in a potential knower) is instead conceptualized as "women are unknowable" or "women are mysterious" (a formulation which implies that the obstacle to knowledge is to be found in women themselves.)

(1b') I believe women are mysterious because women are mysterious.

[Form: I believe p because p.]

(1c') Women are mysterious because I believe they are mysterious.

[Form: p because I believe p.]

My thesis is that (1b') is false, (1c') is true, and (1) is widely believed. This is an instance of epistemic looping.

***

Why are things unknown? [from old draft]

Why is it hard to know things about nonravens? There are two possible responses: (i) perhaps there are no facts about nonravens, because nonravens do not form a natural kind; [nonraven-hood is not suitable for induction.] (ii) perhaps facts about nonravens do exist, but they are not known because we have not invested sufficient resources in investigating them. The latter option is more cautious: if we are not sure that our kinds do cut the world at its joints, we should be hesitant to conclude that anything we do not know about lacks internal unity. After all, we do not know about it; so we do not know whether it has internal unity.

(1) women are the victims of epistemic discrimination (which may or may not take the form of looping.)

(2) women are inherently so internally diverse that it is impossible to know anything about them as a group.

I want to emphasize that the objective/subjective distinction that is implicit in these competing theses is only a distinction of degree. Both (1) and (2) can be true to some degree, and "impossible" may be too strong a word to characterize the position in (2). To any extent that women are internally diverse, human beings will be internally diverse

What I want to caution against is the characterization of women as "the unknowable half of humankind."

***

Tough Love

I don't care whether some women are excluded by a definition of womanhood which is beneficial to women as a whole. Well, ok, I care: but that fact isn't important enough to prevent enacting a policy which is beneficial to women as a whole.

***

Do I need to present evidence for (1)? Can I just get away with the comment about "what women want"?

Knowing and being known about

Miranda Fricker claims that one form sexism takes is the denigration of womens' status as knowers. The perception is self-fulfilling: because women are not taken to be knowers (e.g., to have epistemic authority), they in fact wind up with less epistemic authority than they could (and, presumably, should) have. The process by which this is made true is called "looping" (at least by Haslanger and Langton). A Beauvoir-ian critique is appropriate here: one shouldn't directly dispute the truth of the claim that women unequal knowers. Instead, one should demonstrate that, to the extent that the claim is true, it is only "contingently" true (contingent in a special sense which Beauvoir drew attention to--ie., changeable). Since the status quo is revealed to be both contingent and manifestly unjust, the proper course of action suggests itself.

One way "looping" happens--though probably not the only way--is in performatives. If men (as opposed to women) have the requisite authority to successfully execute performatives, they will more often be in a position to make certain sentences express true propositions. This is something that MacKinnon has often pointed out: there is a relationship between power (that which bestows or constitutes authority) and truth. Or, to put the same point a bit differently: the more power you have, the more you know, because of your ability to make things true. The advantage a powerful person has when it comes to knowing things does not indicate any superior rationality.

It may be a prerequisite of the Beauvoir-ian maneuver to be anti-essentialist about the gender of women. This does not seem to be a problematic commitment; it was certainly a commitment for which Beauvoir presented a strong (and eloquent) defense. It is really no more than Kripke's acceptance of modality de re; in other words, a working assumption of contemporary analytic philosophy. [*ah, minus Kripke's odd essentialism of origins!]

********

All of the foregoing seems unquestionably correct to me. But what interests me more is not so much women's status as knowers, but their status as things that are known about. So here is an additional empirical claim I am prepared to make about the status of women: women are denigrated in their status as known (about).

There seems to be a divergence of views on this point, akin to reactions to the claim that women are not knowers. One is to deny the truth of the claim. The problem is that in practice this means women are mistaken for men. For example, women were, for a long time, considered "small, weak men" from the point of view of medical research, with deplorable results.

An alternative, which I see everywhere these days, is to accept the claim, because (the story goes) women are intrinsically mysterious. Oppressive features of such view suggest themselves immediately. Because women are regarded as mysterious, there is no profit in doing research about them. The result is, of course, that less is known about women, which reinforces the impression that they are mysterious and unknowable. (I think there is something right here about the society characterizes the psychology of women, as well as their physiology. Thus "what do women want?" is somehow a bizarrely unknowable question, rather than a stupid question which can only receive an equally stupid answer.)

I believe we are ripe for a Beauvoir-ian move here as well: it is contingently true that women are "mysterious"; ie, that less is known about them than is known about men. Women's status as mysterious is not essential to them; rather, it tells us something about us: about the epistemic community that considers them. (Complaints about projection go here.) Thus when Luce Irigaray complains that the concept woman has no coherent unity*--all the coherent unity having been awarded to the concept man--I take her to be making a true claim about the concept. The corresponding claim about women themselves is, I believe, false; at least, once we make the scope distinction, there is no reason to believe that it is true.

(*Beauvoir, of course, would add here that there is something intrinsically confused and contradictory about the ordinary socially accepted notion of woman, since society compels women to assume a contradictory role as simultaneously free and unfree.)

I think my position would not be widely accepted by feminists. The reason is that it is here that the more metaphysical point Beauvoir wanted to make appears to come into conflict with a progressive goal to which feminism has been drawn: to acknowledge women as a diverse category. As Butler puts it, feminism should not be exclusive; it should not burden women with an image of themselves they cannot recognize. After all, we have had enough of that!

Does the claim that women are diverse conflict with the denial of the claim that women are mysterious? It might. A sufficiently heterogenous set of objects will fail to constitute a projectable kind; thus there will be obstacles in principle to knowing truths about such a (gerrymandered) kind. But I can be conciliatory: the thesis is that if women are diverse, they are not that diverse. A brief survey of the extent of the gerrymandering which philosophers can conceive should be sufficient to reassure all parties that both parties can be right. Most terms are vague in the philosophical sense, but no injustice is thereby perpetrated upon the borderline cases. Closer to home: women's magazines present me with a portrait of womanhood which I do not identify with. But it does not depress me, and it certainly does not oppress me.

Fewnotes: Anderson's "Knowledge, human Interests, and Objectivity in Feminist Epistemology"

Some thoughts on feminist "theory choice" in philosophy of science (not something I know much about.)

First, two (one?) theoretical virtue that feminist epistemology contributes: a preference for ontological heterogeneity.

Difficult to make this out: the idea seems to be that conflation (conflating men and women, equivocating between different meanings of "dominate" to establish that male primates dominate females in the wild) is worse than excess complexity. Or, a commitment to the idea that the world is probably ontologically complex. That conviction is shared by this female philosopher, anyway!

The second theoretical virtue is supposed to be "complexity of relationship" (31), but this also seems to boil down to ontological heterogeneity, under the queasy heading "many faces of power" or "many means of resistance" to oppression: "it opens up opportunities for activists to imagine strategies of resistance to oppression that involve changing the social structure rather than attacking individuals" (31). Is imagination itself supposed to be important here? A connection with Beauvoir: we should conceive of alternatives to underscore the contingency of the way things actually are.

There is some discussion of the social history of a Nation of Islam-published book called The Secret History Between Blacks and Jews, a (mostly) factually accurate but extremely misleading list of claims implying a disproportionately large role was played by Jews in facilitating the slave trade and in owning slaves themselves. In fact, the claims are cherry-picked and the implication is false. The natural reaction, Anderson writes, is that although the book tells the truth it fails badly in telling "the whole" truth. But "the whole" truth about slavery, given the nature of slavery, can't be put in value-neutral terms; even if we reject the values of The Secret History we must espouse some values in order to do what its authors did not, and tell "the whole truth." This is a challenge to a 'value-neutral theorist', Anderson says; "I see no contextually value-neutral way to characterize the whole truth, or the significant truths, about slavery" (39).

One objection by the 'value-neutral' camp to Anderson's position (imagined to come from e.g. Susan Haack) is that value-laden theory choice ought to be restricted to the soft or social sciences. Anderson denies that such a distinction between the sciences can be made, given that e.g. physics, a paradigm hard science, concerned itself with certain claims rather than others because of the need to build an atomic bomb. (Wait a minute. The fact that physicists were interested in this question in no way means this question determined their choice of theories!)

The discussion moves on to question whether there is a value-neutral account of natural kinds. (For all sciences now, I guess.) Anderson relates a change in the way that unemployment rates were measured by the government after 1994, with the result that more women were counted as unemployed (but actively seeking work) (45-46). She suggests that from the point of view of "epistemic grounds", this change in classification was "only vaguely justified" (47); it was better for predicting some things and worse for others. However, in value terms it is clearly superior.

***

Do feminists always have to have a point?: a criticism that stings directed at every branch of science? Isn't all the idiocy that's been uncovered in the social sciences good enough to justify the feminist movement and its beneficial effects on the academy? I'm inclined to think it is. My intuitive verdict: the "harder" you go in the sciences, the more resistance to value-laden theory choice you will get. This may even be what people mean by "hard" (or it might be the closest to an acceptable precisification of "hard" that we can come.)

Is there a feminist critique of math? of logic?

Feminazi outrage on occasion of Sotomayor confirmation hearings

How did arguments that we needed more diversity on the court get perverted into arguments that women shouldn't be on the court because they can't be impartial? The explanation seems to implicate a lot of feminist theory as well as a lot of anti-feminist reasoning.

One argument that women should be in the court is that the court will be better if it is more diverse. People who don't want women on the court can respond that the court is already perfect. Their respondents, then, in order to to suggest that a diverse judiciary improves the court, need to maintain the thesis that it is not already prefect. Why not? Well, sometimes and in some cases, the point of view of a person with a minority background will be distinctly relevant to coming to the right conclusion in a case. Then the opposition will then pounce: so, you are saying that race and gender make a difference? You must be a...reverse racist! (and...angry man-hating feminist!)

I guess the right things to stress in response are: (i) the aspects of the case at hand are really relevant to coming to the right conclusion. What's at issue is not that justices of different backgrounds will disagree, but that a diverse judiciary makes the judiciary as a whole more observant, and more likely to reach good results. The implication of the pouncer's argument is that these different results will be bad (mushy, weepy, touch-feely?) results. (ii) The idea that the court is already perfect, especially when it is not diverse, is silly. People who display epistemic hubris should not be rewarded by positions of prestige and high renumeration, particularly at the cost of excluding people who have a good sense of their own epistemic humility. It is very convenient for men to claim that the court is already perfect when (i) it is transparently to their advantage to do so and (ii) all sides would agree that any bias that exists benefits them.

The combination of the two allegations by anti-feminists does seem to be a bit inconsistent. Compare popular arguments for denying women the vote: (i) women are irrational and will wreck democracy by voting for the wrong people (presumably for emotional reasons etc.); (ii) having women participate in democracy is redundant, they'll just vote the way their husbands (or fathers) tell them to. Either women will change the outcomes of elections or they won't--surely we can agree on the disjunction; the important sleight of hand is that any change they do produce will be change for the worse.

Butler II: "Variations on Sex and Gender: Beauvoir, Wittig and Foucault"

Introduction.

What is the relationship between sex and gender? Beauvoir first raised the question. She made a distinction between what is and is not freely chosen or (at least partially) freely enacted, giving the term "sex" to one and "gender" to the other. But does "sex" thus conceived even exist? We examine the question through the work of Monique Wittig, who considers the distinction "anachronistic," and Foucault, who rejects the category of "natural sex."

I. Sartrian Bodies and Cartesian Ghosts.

The idea that we can choose our gender seems to imply that there is a gender-free standpoint we can occupy. But such a "Cartesian ego" is a widely frowned-upon notion. (Meaning: either it does not exist, or it is a very poor way to conceive of what really does exist.) It would be best not to saddle Beauvoir with a belief in Cartesian egos; we must find a way that one chooses to take on a gender which "does not presuppose that this agency is itself disembodied."

There follows some discussion of what it would mean for the one not merely to be what one is--in the Sartrean vein. At one point, "transcendence" is compared to reference (with the body itself referring):

"As a condition of access to the world, the body is a being comported beyond itself, referring to the world and thereby revealing its own ontological status as a referential entity." (cit., italics mine)

This seems like it could fruitfully be compared to belief's aim at truth, and desire's aim at the good. Since belief is answerable to a norm, "...because I believe p" is not (usually) a good justification for believing p. [Being very Moran-ian here.]

II. Gender as Choice

How to understand choice of gender, if it is not [Cartesian] choice "from a distance"? Beauvoir's view is like Sartre's account of "pre-reflective choice": he says our awareness of such choices constitutes (mere) "quasi-knowledge." It is something we are always doing, and it is "strategic and covert."

There seem to be two thoughts here. One is (following Sartre) that choosing our gender is something which we are only dimly aware of doing; we could try to exercise more conscious control over these things by first increasing that awareness (like, for example, trying to be more conscious of whether we are being rude to others.) Going further, it is something we are always doing and by increasing awareness of what we are doing, we take appropriate responsibility for it.

The second idea seems to be that there is something necessarily covert about choosing one's gender. This might be related to ideas about how, although gender norms are e.g. bad for women, we must be strategic in choosing what to protest against because of the nature of the threat. Beauvoir, Butler says, is trying to show how women's choices can contribute to the oppression of themselves and others. Butler also reiterates that deviating from gender norms is very difficult in our society and terrifying to anyone that does it.

III. Embodiment and Autonomy

"Beauvoir's analysis of the body takes its bearings within the cultural situation in which men have traditionally been associated with the disembodied or transcendent feature of human existence and women with the bodily and immanent feature of human existence." This dualism is bad for everyone but bad for women in particular, and Beauvoir attempts a fusion. Part of the task of clearing the ground for such a fusion is criticizing the notion of a Cartesian disembodied self; Beauvoir "criticizes implicitly the model of autonomy upheld by these masculine gender norms."

IV. The Body as Situation

The synthesis of the "gender polarity" (or "antinomy"?) presented above is, for Beauvoir, the notion of the body as situation. There are two meanings: the body is "located and defined within a social context", and it is a "locus of the dialectical process" of interpreting a set of historical interpretations.

To reinterpret the preexisting (bodily?) norms with the body is "a very concrete and accessible way of politicizing personal life."

If we accept the body as a "cultural situation" (and not just a situation?), then the idea that there is a natural body is suspect, as is the idea that there is a natural sex. The real constraints on interpretation are social, not biological. So, although Beauvoir does not go this far, we should be skeptical about whether gender is connected with sex at all.

V. The Body Politic

If sex is not natural--ie, it doesn't antedate the social construction of gender, then "Beauvoir's theory seems implicitly to ask whether sex was not gender all along." Wittig says "yes" in her article "One is not Born a Woman." For example, it is presupposed that sex is dyadic. "Binary opposition always serves the purposes of hierarchy."

(A bit hard to follow here. It seems that Wittig wants us to consider why we chose to use certain physical characteristics--those related to reproduction--and not others to make such an important social distinction. This is the question we should be asking, and since the answer is social and not biological, sex is (more of?) a social distinction than a biological or natural one.)

Does Wittig mean that the manifest anatomical differences between men and women are an illusion? No.

One upshot, for Wittig, of this way of characterizing the big binary distinction amongst members of the human race is to make heterosexuality mandatory (why?). [from further on in section: "because the category of 'sex' only make sense in terms of a binary discourse on sex in which 'men' and 'women' exhaust the possibilities...and relate to each other as complementary opposites."]

We can see Wittig use the same strategy--questioning the "isolation and valorization" of certain distinctions amongst others--in her Lesbian Body. There, the distinction she challenges is between erogenous and non-erogenous body parts. But what are we to make of this "utopian" work? Surely not that lesbianism is the new "natural" sexual orientation.

Where Wittig takes a stand on this issue, her claim is rather that a sex-less society would be best. This could be established by abolishing sex or by a "proliferation of genders" (but I thought sex and gender were distinct?)

Wittig alleges that lesbians are not women, because they are not in relationships with men. But then they are "caught up in another binary opposition, ie, the opposition to heterosexuality itself" (sigh!) The solution to this (problem?) is to make lesbianism "a multiple cultural phenomenon, a gender with no univocal essence." "If binary restrictions are to be overcome in experience, they must meet their dissolution in the creation of new cultural forms."

Wittig's theory finds support in Foucault's The History of Sexuality (vol 1.) In seeking to "subvert" the model of oppressor and oppressed, Foucault "offers some strategies for the subversion of gender hierarchy."

Foucault is less utopian than Wittig in that he doesn't believe power can be "dissipated." however, he is "concerned with subverting and dissipating the existing terms of juridical power." (What does this mean? Does "term" mean "word"? Is the point of this to play word games?)

Once again, however, 'proliferation' is the key: "The subversion of binary opposites does not result in their transcendence for Foucault, but in their proliferation to a point where binary oppositions become meaningless in a context where multiple differences...abound."

VI. Conclusion: Embodying Dissonance

Beauvoir, and Wittig and Foucault after her, represent a strain of feminism which holds (i) that sex and gender are contingent and (ii) social progress is best achieved by proliferation, which undermines traditional sex and gender distinctions because those distinctions are necessarily binary. These writers are therefore to be contrasted with to another strain of feminism, whichaccepts the fundamental distinction between the sexes and seeks to give expression to "the distinctively feminine side of the binary opposition."

Yet this approach falls vicim to "existential pitfalls of Sartreanism"? (= the myth of radical and unconstrained choice?) It ignores the role of others in constituting us; we cannot constitute ourselves alone.

Consider (in addition?) a Freudian critique, according to the Freudian notions of sexual identity. Feudians would hold that proliferation is itself a utopian fantasy. It is not clear to what extent the Beauvoir-Wittig-Foucault position that sexual and gender identity are "contingent" is incompatible with Freudianism.

Is it wrong to pursue the other feminist project, that of elaborating and exploring "what women want, how that specific pleasure makes itself known" etc.? (Why would it be?) The category of woman is useful "regardless of the descriptive emptiness of the term." (I'm not sure why these considerations, of the usefulness though emptiness of 'woman' etc., don't apply equally to 'man').

The problem that this approach has to face, and that the Beauvoir-Wittig-Foucault tradition can rectify, is that individual women may not "recognize themselves" in such accounts (and this is more likely to happen as time goes by?) For that, it seems that Beauvoir's position, that there is not essence of woman, is the right one.

Butler I: ``Gendering the Body" (Beauvoir's philosophical contribution)

Idea I. "Feminist account of bodily theory"

The body is important and it isn't important.

Beauvoir provided a theory of "Gender identity and gender acquisition"

``Gender is not passively received...[it is] a peculiar kind of achievement, the culturally mediated relationship of an embodied agency to itself." (255)

The possibility of bad faith: "Just as Sartre's famous waiter is a waiter, so we can be our gender in a similarly false way. Indeed we might well call such a being the bad faith of gender." (256)

"...it is necessary to substitute a vocabulary of action and effort for the reified vocabulary of self-identical nouns." (256)

Idea II.

"In the case of women, cultural norms constrain us to become, to choose, that which is the very opposite of choice. In other words, we are compelled to become the Other, the opposite of the Subject." (256)

"For Beauvoir, it seems, we must understand the gender of woman as that particular modality of choice that is culturally constrained to choose against itself." (257)

Idea III.

"...what if, in existentialist fashion, gender is nothing other than the acts that realize it, so that gendered behavior and desire are the modes through which gender is regularly constituted?...perhaps Beauvoir criticizes the notion of gender as a natural substance in much the same way that Sartre disputed the reality of the substantial self." (259)

Idea IV.

Are we getting rid of normative vocabulary? (by getting rid of a notion of naturalness or natural gender as determined by sex?)

"...it [would be] no longer possible to discriminate between right and wrong genders, right and wrong sexes, or right and wrong directionalities for sexual desire, for there would be no natural model against which to judge any of their myriad expressions." (260)

Idea V.

Butler ends by relating de Beauvoir's recollection of her (Beauvoir's) mother's death. She writes that death is unnatural: ``There is no such thing as a natural death: nothing that happens to a human being is ever natural, since a human presence calls the world into question. [Everyone] must die, but for [every person] [one's] death is an accident and, even if [one] knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation." (qtd pg. 262).

I assume here that Beauvoir means to contrast two different notions of naturalness; she wants to highlight that some sort of "existential-ethical" notion of naturalness, the one she is interested in and the one that is amenable to speaking about self-understanding. This notion of naturalness is not (i) statistical naturalness (for then death would surely be natural), and (ii) not any kind of biological naturalness (for then death is also surely natural.) Since death is an affront to human projects, it may be a moral or existential tragedy all the same.

Nice Borges quotes

I. From `The Theologians'

The end of the story can only be told in metaphors, since it takes place in the kingdom of heaven, where time does not exist. One might say that Aurelian spoke with God and found that God takes so little interest in religious difference that He took him for John of Pannonia. That, however, would be to impute confusion to the divine intelligence. It is more correct to say that in paradise, Aurelian discovered that in the eyes of the unfathomable deity, he and John of Pannonia (the orthodox and the heretic, the abominator and the abominated, the accuser and the victim) were a single person.

II. From `The Zahir'

Time, which softens recollections, only makes the memory of the Zahir all the sharper. First I could see the face of it, then the reverse; now I can see both sides at once. It is not as though the Zahir were made of glass, since one side is not superimposed on the other--rather, it is as though the vision were itself spherical, with the Zahir rampant in the center. Anything that is not the Zahir comes to me as though through a filter, and from a distance--Teodelina's disdainful image, physical pain. Tennyson said that if we could but understand a single flower we might know who we are and what the world is. Perhaps he was trying to say that there is nothing, however humble, that does not imply the history of the world and its infinite concatenation of causes and effects. Perhaps he was trying to say that the visible world can be seen entire in every image, just as Shopenhauer tells us that the Will expresses itself entire in every man and woman. The Kabbalists believed that man is a microcosm, a sybolic mirror of the universe; if one were to believe Tennyson, everything would be--everything, even the unbearable Zahir.

Meeting Notes 7/15/09

Part I. Much confusion about logic and (T)-sentences engendered by McG and McL's review of Williamson's Vagueness. Inference to keep in mind: p & -Dp => p & -p is supertruth-preserving, ie, globally valid. (What is the result? An analogue of bivalence for Definite* Truth?)

Part II. Tolerance: different notions of tolerance for different approaches to vagueness. A metaphysicalist notion of tolerance would be one that isn't cast in semantic or epistemic terms. Is such a notion available? Well, I think one is available. It would have to be one which still blocks the sorites. Prof. McGee thinks the notion--e.g. topological openness--is a nonstarter for vague objecthood. Not so clear it is a nonstarter for vagueness in general.

The relevant sorites here was a phenomenal sorites, so Delia Graff's position was discussed. Not clear what hangs on the fact that it was phenomenal, though. Perhaps that there doesn't seem to be an nonphenomenologically specifiable `parameter of application' for colored bits. We are inclined to accept statements like `if we can't tell them apart, then they are the same shade.' We are not inclined to accept such a statement for tallness: one person can certainly be taller than another, by just a bit, even if we can't inspect this difference.

Graff's contextualist take on the sorites must be importantly connected to the claim that every (color?-)point is located in some neighborhood of the same color. It is the size of that neighborhood which is non-constant (= context-dependent?)

Stage III. Back to Mereology. Very unclear what to say here. All the options are on the table, and none seem exciting. Postulating vague objects as a solution to problems of material constitution and mereological indeterminacy (that is, no answer to the `which'? question) seems to be foolhardy, like postulating `false objects' as the truthmakers of claims of the form `p is false,' or postulating a Mr. Nobody as the referent of ``nobody." Not sure there is a bun in the oven here.

Surprise Exam, take I: Moore and Quine

Moore: ``p and I don't know that p."

Moore-belief: ``p, and I don't believe that p."

Surprise Exam: ``p, and you won't know that p." ((i)change `I' to `you,' then (ii) change `don't know' to `won't know.')

Surprise Exam-belief: ``p, and you won't believe that p."

From this point of view, it seems that the simplest case would be to ignore the effect of time. What about a synchronous surprise-exam sentence:

Surprise Exam Synchronous: ``p, and you don't know that p."

[Can I say this to God, who knows everything? No.]

Should you believe SES? Let's agree in advance that it's certainly possible that something of the form of SES be true: there are plenty of true things that we do not know or believe!

SES could either be true or false. Case 1: it is true. Then you don't know that p. But why not? You've just been told. Perhaps the speaker has undermined her credibility by questioning your conversational competence (ie, your ability to pick up on what is said to you.) So even though the speaker is speaking truly, you can't tell she is. So she is correct. But if she is correct, then you should believe SES...shouldn't you?

[Quine's solution seems to be: to assume that SES is true is not to assume that you believe it is true. (This is the point with the Fermat analogy.) That's right in general, but the content of SES is special, such that, if you assume it's true, you ARE making assumptions about whether you believe it's true. Namely, you are assuming you don't believe it's true. And that is odd. Suppose the mathematician assumed not only that Fermat's theorem was true, but that he, the mathematician, didn't believe it, and relied on the fact that he didn't believe it to prove it! ]

Case 2: SES is false. Then (->) either p is false or you do know that p. Case 2a: p is false. No contradictions here; p is contingent, after all. [Is this something you cannot conclude if e.g. God is giving the exam? p may be contingent, but God is infallible*.] Case 2b. You do know that p. Then p is true. But this conflicts with the assumption of Case 2. Contradiction.

(What's needed here is not merely God's infallibility. There's also something about assertions. If I assert `p and q', I have asserted `p' and I have asserted `q'.)

The data are: the argument that there can be no exam appears sound, but it can't be true. So, what is wrong with the argument? The ``Logical Approach" says that the argument is not actually sound, because it is circular or self-referential in some way. [Compare: the sorites appears sound, but it can't be true. So, what is wrong with the sorites argument?] An alternative Logical Approach might be: the argument is sound, but it doesn't show what we think it shows.

The ``Epistemological Approach," on the other hand, is interested in the idea that whether or not an exam is a surprise depends on what we justifiably believe. So it is really a puzzle about justification. This is the route according to which the paradox is importantly related to Moore's sentence.

Logical approach: suppose the announcement is correct, and there will be a surprise exam. Then there won't be a surprise exam (because it won't be a surprise.)

(The announcement can be incorrect in two ways: either there will be no exam, or there will be but it won't be a surprise.)

Metaphysics of the Stone Age

[Unger holds that, contra Austin's `famous dictum,' ordinary language does embody ``the metaphysics of the Stone Age"...strange!]

Skepticism's Role

What is skepticism's place? It was fashionable for a while to dismiss it as confused: this fashion arose from Austin's philosophy. That approach is not so popular now. But is the current state of affairs any fairer to the skeptic?

Stroud questions the ``apparently liberal" idea that skepticism should be treated as a theory amongst many others. The implication is that this is a deceptive way of seeming to acknowledge its force while setting it up to lose:

``[this approach takes skepticism seriously] only to the extent of weighing it in the scales of theoretical plausibility, fully on a par with a series of alleged competitors. And, on that assessment, not surprisingly, philosophical skepticism is felt to be even less worthy of consideration than, say, Ptolemaic astronomy or the account of creation in the book of Genesis." [Review of Unger, 246-247]

But what could the alternative be? A reviewer of Stroud's The Significance of Philosophical Skepticism writes that ``Stroud rejects the claim that skeptical doubts are scientific and that we are free to use science to meet them" [Squires, 559].

In his review of Unger's Ignorance, Stroud argues that the way to go is NOT to do what Unger does, and take the bait of the liberal idea. For then one must argue that, as a theory on all fours with other theories, skepticism is actually plausible. Unger's way of doing that is by a simple, ``if it walks like a duck..." strategy.

``And then, I thought, of all the reasons skepticism might be impossible to refute, one stands out as the simplest: it isn't wrong, it's right. The reason why skeptical arguments are so compelling, always able to rise again to demand our thought, would then be a simple one: These arguments, unlike attempts to refute them, served the truth." [Unger, 2]

Stroud finds this epiphany unconvincing; to him, the strategy behind it is misguided. But this isn't to say that there isn't something to the ``duck" strategy. A comparison is with a debate over whether someone knows something. In the absence of a widely-agreed upon theory of knowledge, it is impossible to sketch a story in which our storytelling non-question-beggingly ensures (by exploiting a sufficient condition on knowledge) that S knows p. But if we were to say, for example, that S believes p, that p is true, that S's belief is safe, that it is secure, that S's belief is inferentially justified by other of his beliefs, that all of S's supporting beliefs are based on expert testimony, etc...there comes a point at which an interlocutor who maintains that S doesn't know that p is in an unattractive position. If it looks, smells, etc. like knowledge, then, protestations aside, it probably is knowledge. What strikes me as bizarre about Eklund's way with ontic vagueness is that it is the equivalent of granting that S has a JTB that p, but arguing that, since JTB isn't always K, we shouldn't conclude that S knows p. But even if JTB doesn't cut ice as a reductive account of knowledge, it is good evidence of knowledge.

I want to use something like the duck strategy in discussing ontic vagueness. The position is like skepticism in that it is questionable whether it is really ``on all fours" with other accounts of vagueness (\knowledge).

Williamson comments on the ``if it walks like a duck" line of thought with regard to ``vagueness in things":

The idea of vagueness in things has attracted some and repelled others. The idea attracts, because it promises to allow a rather direct relation between our vague ordinary words and the facts we use them to describe...The idea repels, because it promises to forbid a complete description of all the facts in precise scientific words. Opposed metaphysical proclivities underlie the ensuing debate. [qtd. Hyde, 297]

Cook's distinctions

Charge (via Sainsbury and Tye): mathematical models idealize away the vagueness of ordinary language. Therefore, we cannot use mathematical models to capture or study vagueness itself. (Is that the goal of the vagueness literature?)

Cook thinks we can solve the problem we face by making a distinction between mathematicaldescriptions (bad) and mathematical models (good).

"On the traditional view of the role of formalization," Cook writes, "[Tye's and Sainsbury's criticisms] are devastating."

Unsurprisingly, though, the distinction between the alternative, `model' view (of math and logic) and the traditional `description' view is, well, vague. The description view says that`every aspect' of the model is meant to `correspond to something actually occurring.' (Can we really quantify over aspects? Or things occurring? Isn't this a bit like quantifying over `things about you' when I say there's something I like about you?)

The `description view' is the negation of this: there are admittedly aspects of the model which do not correspond to something actually occurring.

Cook also offers a third view, the `instrumentalist view of logic', which is really just a more extreme version of the model view. (`Nothing' corresponds.)

Aspects are divided into the representors and the artefacts (12-13).

Ineradicable II

Is there any sentence p such that `Definitely* p' is true? Remember we will be approximating Definitely* from a non-S5 modal system. So it is like asking what is Necessary* where that means true in every world that accessible from every world that is accessible from every world...that is accessible from the actual world. Presumably there are no such sentences p?

What about some sentence p that is true in the actual world itself? Doesn't Necessarily* define an accessibility relation (accessibility*?) which makes the world accessible* from itself?

Ineradicable?

It's a very weird---fuzzy, elusive thought that if vagueness is eliminable by the application of a (single?) operator, then vagueness is not a deep phenomenon. But there's definitely something to it. Heck and MacFarlane comment on the difficulty:

``Since both the semantic assumptions and the formal principle [S5 analogue] imply that vagueness is eradicable, the assumption of either begs the question against the Indefinitist [ie, the Metaphysicalist.]

...[But] the problem with these [foregoing] remarks is that the claim that vagueness is ineradicable, as it stands, is rather imprecise. The claim can not be that no operator can eliminate vagueness, as the trivial falsum operator would surely do that. The though, rather, is that, while it is almost essential to such views that there are operators which strengthen vague statements, which make them rather less vague (e.g. `Definitely') , there can be no such operator which eliminates vagueness." (Heck, 284)

The problem with the falsum operator is surely that it obliterates all distinctions in the language, making every sentence (and its negation) false!

For the vagueness of tall, there is presumably another description of any tall object which could completely eliminate the vagueness...but this is not an addition of an operator to the original sentence, but rather

a different sentence altogether.

...I'm not convinced that the higher-order sorites poses a serious worry even for standard degree theories. The predicate ``satisfies `tall' to degree 1" is sufficiently theoretical that it's not clear why we should accept a sorites premise formulated with it. Perhaps that is why the objection is usually run using a sentential operator D (for `Definitely'), stipulated to have the following semantics:

[[Ds]] = 1 if [[s]] = 1

We do have a strong inclination to accept a sorites premise for ``definitely tall." But it's not clear that the ordinary meaning of ``definitely" matches that of D as defined above. More plausibly, ``definitely p" means something like ``p is true enough, by a good margin, for present purposes," or ``p has degree 1 by a good margin," and on this understanding we should expect ``definitely p" to take non-extremal degrees, since ``enough" and ``good margin" are vague. If that is right, then a degree theory can say exactly the same thing about a sorites with ``definitely tall" as it says with a sorites about ``tall." (MacFarlane, 31-32)