Abstract
The Argument from Vagueness for Universalism contends that any non-arbitrary restriction on composition must be vague, but that vague composition leads to unacceptable count indeterminacy. One common response to the argument is that borderline cases of composition don’t necessarily lead to count indeterminacy because a determinately existing thing may be a borderline case of a presently existing concrete composite object. We can collectively refer to such views as versions of the Status Response. This paper argues that the Status Response cannot handle count indeterminacy about various categories of things, such as events, states of affairs, tropes, holes, shadows, and created abstracta, when these are understood in the right way. This makes the Status Response objectionablfy ad hoc, which should lead us to look for alternative ways of resisting the Argument from Vagueness.
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Notes
See Korman (2010) for a helpful overview. To keep things simple, I will stipulate that Nihilism is a limiting case of a sharp cut-off in composition (as it were, the series is cut off right at the outset, at a determinate case of non-composition) and thus runs afoul of V6.
In worlds with infinitely many concrete objects, there are determinately (the same order of) infinite number of objects even if for some xs it is indeterminate if there is an object that they compose.
I owe this ingenious moniker to Nathan Wildman.
I’m taking some liberty in interpreting Baker here. She doesn’t mention precisifications and is happy to speak of “vague objects”; however, she emphasizes that vague objects in her sense determinately exist but indeterminately have the property of existing-at-a-certain-time. (She also argues that constitution is vague, but as far as I can tell this ultimately plays little role in her view.) See also Gallois (2004, pp. 652–653) for a similar (albeit less worked out) view.
Effingham is in fact less committal than this and mentions the possibility of borderline concreta as part of a dilemma for supporters of the Argument from Vagueness. But the other options he discusses are not relevant to the Status Response.
Smith’s and Woodward’s views also have elements of the other responses to the Argument from Vagueness. Both of them reject Sider’s linguistic approach to vagueness, and Smith also argues that “concrete parthood” is subject to vagueness.
Lewis’s version assumes that ‘is a part of’ is also a precise expression, something that Carmichael explicitly denies. Sider, however, discharges this premise and replaces it with the claim that it cannot be indeterminate how many concrete objects there are. I think Carmichael could reasonably generalize the “proto-K” strategy by saying that a proto-cloud is also a proto-concrete-object, which would turn his view into a response to Sider’s version of the argument, too. [See also Hawley (2004, p. 390) and Donnelly (2009) for views on which the predicate ‘is a part of’ has multiple precisifications. For the reason just mentioned, it’s not clear that this move addresses Sider’s version of the argument.].
Perhaps cloud dispersions are “temporally maximal” and cannot be temporal parts of other cloud dispersions. Suppose, therefore, that the process doesn’t continue beyond t2: between t1 and t2 the xs go from determinately composing a cloud to borderline-composing one, and by t3 they again condense enough to determinately compose a cloud. Or perhaps the relevant part of the universe freezes and the xs keep borderline-composing a cloud ‘til the end of times. What matters is that we conceive of the cloud’s borderline-dispersion between t1 and t2 as maximal in the relevant sense.
See Goswick (2018) for a concise and helpful overview.
A restriction of event-constituent properties to fundamental ones would have a reasonably good chance of eliminating event vagueness; for example, it’s intuitive that electronhood doesn’t have borderline instances (cf. Barnes 2005). However, we cannot escape vagueness so easily with merely minimally sparse properties. Moreover, this looser restriction sits better with some of the theoretical roles commonly assigned to events. For instance, causation doesn’t take place only at the fundamental level (and perhaps of all places that’s where it especially doesn’t take place). If so, Kimian events qua causal relata require non-fundamental property constituents.
Perhaps ‘minimally sparse’ is subject to vagueness, but this doesn’t undermine the example. For on the sparse Kimian conception, if O1…On instantiate R at t and R is merely an abundant relation, then there is no such thing as O1…On’s R-ing at t. It’s not as if there is an event-like category of entities some of which are events and some of which are non-event instantiations. Rather, there are no property instantations other than events.
In his book-length defense of necessitism, Williamson only makes passing reference to the view’s potential to answer the Argument from Vagueness (2013, p. 9). Obviously, necessitism could be true even if it isn’t promising as a version of the Status to this argument; it’s just that in that case, the necessitist needs a different response to the Argument from Vagueness. Williamson himself is an epistemicist about vagueness (Williams, 1994), so he would presumably reject V6.
For the same reason, it’s implausible to subsume borderline cases of event types under much broader event types that don’t admit of borderline cases. For instance, it’s implausible to claim that each borderline cloud dispersion is a determinate case of an event of increasing distance between some water molecules. It’s true, of course, that whenever a cloud borderline-disperses, the distance between its composing water molecules increase. What’s implausible is that the increase of the distance between the water molecules just is the borderline-dispersion of the cloud; these don’t seem to be two descriptions for numerically the same event. (Thanks to an anonymous referee.).
Here I agree with Wake (2011, pp. 30–31), who warns against “quietist” versions of the Status Response.
For vagueness in sparse tropes and in re universals (which will be discussed in the context of states of affairs), see Barnes (2005).
Couldn’t the xs taken together be fragile? My answer is twofold. First: intuitively, no. Our pre-theoretical conception of fragility implies the propensity of something to break into pieces, and a plurality doesn’t seem like the sort of thing (or more precisely, things) that can break into pieces. In other words, fragility on the face of it can only characterize things with mereological structure. Second: the strategy of insisting that fragility is a plurally instantiable property doesn’t generalize well. For either some minimally sparse property isn’t plurally instantiable or all are. If the former, we can just run our example with that property. But if the latter, then we get some indirect evidence against restricted composition, for in that case no composite object is needed to account for the instantiation of sparse properties. If every sparse property is plurally instantiable then composite objects are explanatorily redundant and (one may think) should all be treated as metaphysically on a par: either none exists, or they exist abundantly, albeit without any explanatory value (as “ontological free lunch”, to use Armstrong’s phrase). Now, I’m not saying that it’s incoherent for a restrictivist about composition to claim that all tropes are plurally instantiated. My claim is only that this is a dialectically awkward move, and that it’s fair to assume as our default hypothesis that some sparse tropes aren’t plural.
The possibilist strategy, which prima facie seems to have the best chance of being generalizable across different ontological categories, is unpromising when applied either to states of affairs or tropes. In the case of states of affairs that involve an in re universal with at most one instance, the strategy requires an ontology of possible universals that are merely contingently in re universals. But this is simply Platonism (the ontology of ante rem universals) by another name! A similar remark applies to possibilism about tropes. A Platonist would understand the property of being Socrates’ snub-nosedness as an ante rem universal that is contingently instantiated by Socrates and necessarily not instantiated by anything else. However, an entity that is merely contingently a trope but could have been a non-trope doesn’t seem any different from a certain kind of Platonic universal. Or, to put it a bit more cautiously, talk of possible tropes that may be tropes contingently (call them “proto-tropes”) could be interpreted as talk of haecceitistic Platonic universals without any problem; the two posits play the same theoretical roles in the same way. When a proto-tropist says that a proto-trope isn’t a trope in the actual world, the Platonist will say that a universal is uninstantiated. When a proto-tropist says that tropes cannot be shared, the Platonist reminds us that the universals at issue are haecceitistic. And when the proto-tropist claims that a proto-trope becomes a trope and then stops being a trope, the Platonist can say that an uninstantiated haecceitistic universal becomes instantiated and then stops being instantiated.
I thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this example, which is superior to the one with which I first came up.
This is true on Casati and Varzi’s (1994) immaterialist view as well as on Meadows’ (2015) more recent theory, according to which holes are special kinds of properties. It’s less clear whether the classic view of Lewis and Lewis (1970) implies indeterminacy about the number of holes that cannot be treated as indeterminacy about the hole status of some broader category of determinately existing things. As Casati and Varzi (1994, pp. 44–54, 2004) point out, Lewis and Lewis’s identification of holes with hole linings leads to a kind of ambiguity about which entity in the world a hole is, since for every hole there is a multitude of candidate hole linings that it could be identified with. However, this is a problem about there being too many holes rather than indeterminately many. The crux of the issue, as far as I can see, is what exactly a hole-lining is. As Casati and Varzi (1994, p. 30) point out, hole-linings are ontologically mysterious since they are neither identical to their hosts nor parts of their hosts (since holes themselves aren’t parts of their hosts). This raises questions about whether hole-linings can be subsumed under a broader category of entities whose members may be indeterminate cases of hole-lining.
For an argument that musical works also raise a problem about vague existence, see Friedell (2017).
Indeed, this is perhaps the most crucial difference between Platonist accounts of words (e.g. Wetzel 2009) and the “created artifact” view.
It’s worth observing that the case of abstract artifacts is especially challenging for necessitists who seek to explain away indeterminately existing objects as determinately existing borderline-concreta, because abstract artifacts are determinately nonconcrete even in the paradigmatic cases and even in Willamson’s more demanding sense of ‘concrete’. Perhaps the necessitist could try to argue that ‘irregardless’ is determinately nonconcrete but only a borderline-word; however, I’m not sure what to make of this view. If there is determinately such a thing as ‘irregardless’ then it seems to be the same sort of thing as ‘regardless’: constitutively dependent (even though not identical to) a string of symbols, used for communication, created by language users, believed by its users to have a meaning, etc. If ‘regardless’ is determinately a word and ‘irregardless’ determinately exists, I cannot see how ‘irregardless’ could fail to be determinately the same type of thing, i.e. a word, as well.
Perhaps a kind of radical austere nominalist would want to deny the existence of all of these entities. However, first, this kind of view is also in tension with most forms of the Status Response (e.g. with an ontology of possibilia or proto-objects); and second, if the Status Response forced us to adopt such an austere form of nominalism, that would be an interesting result in itself.
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Acknowledgements
For comments on and discussions about earlier versions of this paper, I thank Claudio Calosi, Fabrice Correia, Dana Goswick, Giovanni Merlo, Robert Michels, Boaz Miller, Nikoletta Nemesi, Jim Stone, Alessandro Torza, Nathan Wildman, anonymous referees, and audiences at department colloquia at the University of Bucharest and at the edios Center of Metaphysics at the University of Geneva. While writing this paper, I was supported by the Israel Science Foundation (Grant No. 2035/19), whose funding I hereby gratefully acknowledge.
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Kovacs, D.M. Against the status response to the argument from Vagueness. Synthese 200, 468 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03945-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03945-y