Evans' Argument and Vague Objects

In 1978, Gareth Evans published a short and somewhat cryptic article purporting to establish that there are no vague objects. This paper is a commentary on this. Prima facie, the claim that there are no vague objects is clearly false. Mt Everest, for example, has no precise boundaries. And if this is so, there must be something wrong with Evans' argument. In the paper, I discuss what this is, giving a model of vague objects in the process.

On the Alleged Inconsistency in Van Inwagen’s Rebuttal of Evans’ Argument

The paper attempts to interpret P. van Inwagen’s refutation of Evans’ argument that there cannot be vague objects and defend it against the charge of inconsistency raised by Radim Bělohrad. However, such an interpretation is not without a cost. Therefore another interpretation of van Inwagen’s example of the Cabinet is offered which evades Evans’ charge of inconsistency against indeterminate identity as it does not need the notion at all.

Modeling the Vagueness of Areal Geographic Objects: A Categorization System

Modeling vague objects with indeterminate boundaries has drawn much attention in geographic information science. Because fields and objects are two perspectives in modeling geographic phenomena, this paper investigates the characteristics of vague regions from the perspective of the field/object dichotomy. Based on the assumption that a vague object can be viewed as the conceptualization of a field, we defined five categories of vague objects: direct field-cutting objects, focal operation-based field-cutting objects, element-clustering objects, object-referenced objects, and dynamic boundary objects. We then established a categorization system to formalize the semantic differences between vague objects using the fuzzy set theory. The proposed framework provides valuable input for the conceptualization, interpretation, and modeling of vague geographical objects.

Vague Objects

In this chapter the theory of propositional vagueness is generalized to vagueness at other types. Once propositional vagueness is supplemented with a primitive notion of objectual vagueness, it can be seen that property vagueness, adverbial vagueness, operator vagueness, and so on, may all be defined. The chapter examines some widely discussed accounts of objectual vagueness that understand objectual vagueness as standing in vague identity or mereological relations. A more general test for objectual vagueness is proposed, according to which an object is vague if it converts any precise property to a vague proposition.

Referential Indeterminacy with an Ontic Source? – A Criticism of Williams’s Defense of Vague Objects

J. Robert G. Williams argues that referential indeterminacy may arise as a result of ontic indeterminacy, and that lambda-abstraction is not applicable to indeterminate identity statements, i.e., statements of the form, ‘it is indeterminate whether