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.

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]

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?

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."