Abstract
In recent work, Elizabeth Barnes and Robbie Williams have attempted to vindicate the intelligibility of the notion metaphysical vagueness. I argue that working negative characterizations of vague objects are satisfactory in so far as they go, but precisely due to its negative nature, they fall short of vindicating per se the intelligibility of the characterized notion. Furthermore, and following Matti Eklund, I argue that the considerations provided by Barnes and Williams do not advance the dialectical situation in connection with this, and I offer some reasons to find their rejoinder wanting. In the second part of this chapter, I summarize Evans’s argument and its significance. I then voice some concerns regarding the particular response offered by Williams, and I explore a more general worry that arises for the discussion by Barnes and Williams.
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Notes
- 1.
A note on terminology. I will be focusing on the issue concerning vague objects and will accordingly speak of ontic vagueness and vagueness in rebus. Arguably, the issue of metaphysical vagueness might be more general, if the vagueness in question could have other metaphysical sources. Also, I will be taking vagueness to be a particular variety of the more general phenomenon of indeterminacy, characteristically manifested in sorites-susceptibility. See below for further discussion concerning ontic vagueness vs. metaphysical indeterminacy.
- 2.
Nor from (vagueness-characteristic) ignorance. See discussion below.
- 3.
Barnes (2010, fn. 25) suggests that her proposal improves on Hawley’s by allowing “for the possibility of ‘mixed cases’—cases where the vagueness in question is, e.g., a mixture of semantic and ontic.” As I see it, Hawley’s proposal can be read, or reinterpreted, as offering a characterization of what it would be for vagueness to be at least partly ontic.
- 4.
This is compatible with there being a sense in which (generic) ambiguity can be syntactically or lexically “realized.”
- 5.
The accuracy of this attribution is perhaps reinforced by their remark: “so long as something along these lines ultimately works, our use of the generic notion in characterizing [metaphysical indeterminacy] will be legitimate” (2011a, 110, my emphasis).
- 6.
Barnes and Williams seem partly sensitive to some such possible misgivings and offer to accommodate them terminologically by reserving indeterminacy for the non-epistemic instances of a more general phenomenon of indefiniteness. Given this stipulation, it is certainly the case that epistemicism offers an account of indefiniteness, if not of indeterminacy. But due to the controversy just alluded to, it is controversial that the general phenomenon is not, after all, disjunctive in nature—see Eklund (2011, 153–4). (Alternatively, if one insists that “indefiniteness” is stipulated to stand for the “pre-theoretic,” nondisjunctive phenomenon that is present in cases of semantic indecision (Barnes and Williams 2011b, 174–5), then the controversy does not allow one just to assume that there is epistemic indefiniteness proper, as opposed to characteristically epistemic alternative phenomena.)
- 7.
Vagueness can be characteristically manifested in soriticality even if some expressions turn out to be vague but not relevantly soritical: see Weatherson’s “few children for an academic,” or cases of nondegree combinatorial vagueness.
- 8.
See Barnes (2009) for her own alternative, counterpart-theoretic response to Evans.
- 9.
Or perhaps on one’s choice of how to word claims regarding the persistence of things—if recent meta-metaphysical indifferentism with respect to the allegedly competing views on persistence turns out to be well taken.
- 10.
It could be said that I am implicitly assuming a “many” solution as opposed to a so-called “supervaluationist” solution to the problem of the many—both of which are compatible with the view of vagueness as semantic indecision. I defend this solution in López de Sa (2013). In any case, this seems to be a further complication of the amoeba example that is absent from more general cases concerning “thing” or “object,” like the mereological example considered below.
- 11.
I am indebted here to Williams for a discussion of an earlier presentation of this argument on his blog Theories’n Things in July 2007.
- 12.
A further assumption, omitted here, will concern us below.
- 13.
Earlier versions were presented at the Arché, LOGOS, and PERSP Metaphysics Seminars, and in a Vagueness Workshop in Charmey. Thanks to participants in these events and to Ross Cameron, Pablo Cobreros, Aurélien Darbellay, Manuel García-Carpintero, John Hawthorne, John Horden, Brian Weatherson, Crispin Wright, Elia Zardini, an anonymous reviewer for this volume, and, especially, Elizabeth Barnes and Robbie Williams. Research has been partially funded by FFI2008-06153, FFI2012-35026, and CSD2009-0056 (MINECO), 2009SGR-1077 (AGAUR), and ITN FP7-238128 (European Community).
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de Sa, D.L. (2014). What Could Vague Objects Possibly Be?. In: Akiba, K., Abasnezhad, A. (eds) Vague Objects and Vague Identity. Logic, Epistemology, and the Unity of Science, vol 33. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7978-5_12
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