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.