Download Theories of Vagueness by Rosanna Keefe PDF
By Rosanna Keefe
Obscure expressions, resembling "heap," "red" and "child," proliferate all through normal languages, and an expanding quantity of philosophical recognition is being directed at theories of the common sense and semantics linked to them. during this ebook Rosanna Keefe explores the questions of what we must always wish from theories of vagueness and the way we must always examine them. Her robust and unique examine could be of curiosity to readers in philosophy of language and of brain, philosophical common sense, epistemology and metaphysics.
Part of the Cambridge experiences in Philosophy sequence.
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Extra resources for Theories of Vagueness
Example text
Any response must explain away apparent dif®culties with accepting the selected solution; for example, if the main premise is denied, it must be explained why that premise is so plausible. More generally, a theory should account for the persuasiveness of the paradox as a paradox and should explain how this is compatible with the fact that we are never, or very rarely, actually led into contradiction. (a) Denying the validity of the sorites argument seems to require giving up absolutely fundamental rules of inference.
If we approach higher-order vagueness by using the D operator within the object language, can we ignore the vagueness or otherwise of the metalanguage? I think not. With the statement (BB) :DDp & :DIp, we may be able to express the fact that p is a second-order borderline case that is not de®nitely de®nitely true and not de®nitely borderline. And (BB) can be unproblematically assigned the value `true' in a non-vague metalanguage. But when we come to assign truth-values to all statements of the object language, we will still be required to assess the truth-value of p itself.
Similarly for the claim that our intuition that a borderline predication is neither true nor false should be accounted for by the fact that it is actually neither de®nitely true nor de®nitely false. For are we then to say that it is either true or false, and if so, how are we to avoid the unwanted consequences of bivalence? 14 In summary, how can it help to add a D operator to the language ± creating new sentences that may be shown to be unproblematically true or false ± when the task is to illuminate the semantics of the old statements which do not contain this operator?