Motivating Non-Contingency

2021 ◽  
pp. 79-99
Author(s):  
Cian Dorr ◽  
John Hawthorne ◽  
Juhani Yli-Vakkuri
Keyword(s):  
Sorites Paradox

This chapter takes up the question of how to motivate the crucial ‘Non-Contingency’ premise in the Tolerance Puzzles introduced in Chapter 2, a question that has received surprisingly little attention in the literature on these puzzles. We articulate and set aside some dubious motivations for the premise, including motivations which assimilate Tolerance Puzzles to the well-known Sorites Paradox. In place of these, we develop a ‘Security Argument’ for Non-contingency, based on the thought that it is not just a matter of chance or luck that we avoid error in believing the Tolerance premise.

Vagueness

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kit Fine
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Mental States ◽  
General Idea ◽  
Sorites Paradox ◽  
Local Phenomenon ◽  
Intrinsic Feature

The book is about the problem of vagueness. It begins by discussing some of the existing views on vagueness and then explains why they have not been thought to be satisfactory. It then outlines a new account of vagueness, based on the general idea that vagueness is a global rather than a local phenomenon. In other words, the vagueness of an expression or object is not an intrinsic feature of the object or an expression but a matter of how it relates to other objects and expression. The development of this idea leads to a new semantics and logic for vagueness. The semantics and logic are then applied to a number of issues, including the sorites paradox, the transparency or luminosity of mental states, and personal identity. It is shown that the view allows one to hew to a much more intuitive position on these various issues.

Vagueness: An Investigation into Natural Languages and the Sorites Paradox.

1994 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 483
Author(s):  
Roy A. Sorensen ◽  
Linda Claire Burns
Keyword(s):  
Sorites Paradox ◽  
Natural Languages

The Riddle of Vagueness

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Crispin Wright
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language ◽  
Borderline Case ◽  
Higher Order ◽  
Cutting Edge ◽  
Sorites Paradox ◽  
Systematic Research ◽  
Pure Mathematics ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
Critical Overview ◽  
Original Treatment

This anthology includes fourteen of Crispin Wrights’s highly influential essays on the phenomenon of vagueness in natural language, collectively representing almost half a century of cutting-edge systematic research. Key issues addressed include whether or under what assumptions vague expressions’ apparent tolerance of marginal changes in things to which they apply indicates that they are governed by inconsistent semantic rules, the varieties of Sorites paradox and the roots of the plausibility of their respective major premises, what it is for something to be a borderline case of a vague expression, whether vagueness should be viewed as fundamentally a semantic or an epistemic phenomenon, whether there is ‘higher-order’ vagueness, and what should be the appropriate logic for vague statements. The essays reprinted here jointly document the development of a distinctively original treatment of the philosophy and logic of vagueness, broadly analogous to the intuitionistic philosophy and logic for pure mathematics. Richard Kimberly Heck contributes an extended introductory essay, providing both an insightful critical overview of the development of the distinctive elements of Wright’s thought about vagueness, and indeed an invaluable advanced introduction to the topic.

Replies to Part II Intuitionism and the Sorites

2020 ◽  
pp. 354-383
Author(s):  
Crispin Wright
Keyword(s):  
Sorites Paradox ◽  
Intuitive Thinking ◽  
Patterns Of Use

This chapter provides a reply to the chapters in Part II of this book. It looks at the philosophical challenges presented by vagueness. Philosophers of language from Frege on had been for the most part content to theorize in ways that ignored vagueness, or to focus on idealized languages in which there was none. And no one writing before 1970 seemed fully to have taken the measure of the awkwardness of the Sorites paradox, or the depth of its roots in our intuitive thinking about what kind of ability mastery of a language is. The chapter concludes that the intuitionistic approach, with its integral repudiation of any idea of vagueness as constituted in semantic facts that somehow underlie and explain the distinctive patterns of use of vague expressions, and its consequent commitment to liberalism about verdicts in the borderline region, does exactly that.

Quandary and Intuitionism

2020 ◽  
pp. 154-174
Author(s):  
Stephen Schiffer
Keyword(s):  
Sorites Paradox ◽  
Main Argument

This chapter offers a sustained commentary on Crispin Wright’s paper “On Being in a Quandary: Relativism, Vagueness, Logic Revisionism.” It begins by giving a brief introduction to the issues surrounding vagueness and the sorites paradox before going on to reconstruct the main argument of Wright’s paper “Vagueness: A Fifth Column Approach”. It then proceeds to endorse Wright’s principal reasons for discounting epistemicist and supervaluationist treatments of vagueness. The chapter then develops a critique of Wright’s technical notion of quandary and of his attempt to solve the Sorites Paradox along intuitionistic lines. Despite venturing some criticisms, the chapter concludes that Wright is correct in thinking that vagueness needs to be explained in terms of the sort of quandary state one is in when one takes a proposition to be borderline.

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