Transvaluationism about vagueness: A progress report
Southern Journal of Philosophy 48 (1):67-94 (2010)
| Abstract | The philosophical account of vagueness I call "transvaluationism" makes three fundamental claims. First, vagueness is logically incoherent in a certain way: it essentially involves mutually unsatisfiable requirements that govern vague language, vague thought-content, and putative vague objects and properties. Second, vagueness in language and thought (i.e., semantic vagueness) is a genuine phenomenon despite possessing this form of incoherence—and is viable, legitimate, and indeed indispensable. Third, vagueness as a feature of objects, properties, or relations (i.e., ontological vagueness) is impossible, because of the mutually unsatisfiable conditions that such putative items would have to meet. In this paper I set forth the core claims of transvaluationism in a way that acknowledges and explicitly addresses a challenging critique by Timothy Williamson of my prior attempts to articulate and defend this approach to vagueness. I sketch my favored approach to truth and ontological commitment, and I explain how it accommodates the impossibility of ontological vagueness. I argue that any approach to the logic and semantics of vagueness that both (i) eschews epistemicism and (ii) thoroughly avoids positing any arbitrary sharp boundaries (either first-order or higher-order) will have to be not an alternative to transvaluationism but an implementation of it. I sketch my reasons for repudiating epistemicism. I briefly describe my current thinking about how to accommodate intentional mental properties with vague content within an ontology that eschews ontological vagueness. And I revisit the idea, which played a key role in my earlier articulations of transvaluationism, that moral conflicts provide an illuminating model for understanding vagueness. | |||||||||
| Keywords | No keywords specified (fix it) | |||||||||
| Categories | ||||||||||
| Options |
|
|||||||||
Download options| PhilPapers Archive |
Upload a copy of this paper Check publisher's policy on self-archival Papers currently archived: 5,875 |
| External links |
 |
| Through your library | Configure |
Similar books and articlesMatti Eklund (2008). Deconstructing Ontological Vagueness. Canadian Journal of Philosophy 38 (1):117-140.
Nicholas J. J. Smith (2005). Vagueness as Closeness. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 83 (2):157 – 183.
Timothy Williamson (1999). On the Structure of Higher-Order Vagueness. Mind 108 (429):127-143.
Diana Raffman (2009). Demoting Higher-Order Vagueness. In Sebastiano Moruzzi & Richard Dietz (eds.), Cuts and Clouds. Vaguenesss, its Nature and its Logic. Oxford University Press.
Terry Horgan (2006). Transvaluationism. The Harvard Review of Philosophy 14 (1):20-35.
Timothy Williamson (2002). Horgan on Vagueness. Grazer Philosophische Studien 63 (1):273-285.
Matjaž Potrč & Vojko Strahovnik (2013). Moral Dilemmas and Vagueness. Acta Analytica 28 (2):207-222.
Matjaž Potrč (2002). Transvaluationism, Common Sense and Indirect Correspondence. Acta Analytica 17 (1):101-119.
Terence Horgan (1998). The Transvaluationist Conception of Vagueness. The Monist 81 (2):313-330.
Analytics
Monthly downloads |
Added to index2010-04-09Total downloads37 ( #32,537 of 556,888 )Recent downloads (6 months)1 ( #64,931 of 556,888 )How can I increase my downloads? |
My notes
Discussion
