Abstract
This paper presents an new epistemicist account of vagueness, one that avoids standard arbitrariness worries by exploiting a plenitudinous metaphysic.
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Notes
The main target of these objections is Timothy Williamson, Vagueness, Routledge, 1994.
For a presentation of supervaluationism, see Kit Fine, (1975).
Consider standard epistemicist and supervaluationist approaches to the ‘problem of the many’, which both rely on positing many candidates in reality. (See, for example, David Lewis, (1999).)
Of course there is a tricker question: Granted you don’t pick out lump-like things with ‘That statue’. But given plenitude and the vagueness of ‘That statue’ there are many candidate entities for ‘That statue’ to refer to. How do you pick out one of them? The account of vagueness we offer below is designed to offer an interesting answer to questions like this.
Further complications to the basic picture will no doubt be needed to account for the traditional problem of the many, whereby objects with slightly different boundaries but which largely overlap all seem to compete for personhood. From the current perspective it will be natural to think that for each relevant set of atoms, there are multiple fusions, with varying psycho-semantic profiles.
If a conversation is going on, it is natural to think that people with coordinate meanings are more suitable conversation partners than people who are not. It is thus natural to think that like-minded thinkers are more suitable referents for ‘You’. When ‘You’ is uttered in a conversation, many minds express different singular thoughts, referring to different conversation partners. (We shall not pursue this issue further here).
After all the method on which the judgment is based leads to falsehood in relevantly similar cases. The situation is similar to one in which a pair of individuals is told that one of them is Jack Lyons. If Jack Lyons were to think ‘I am Jack Lyons’, simply on the basis of the information, he would is the epistemically relevant sense, be someone who could very easily have been wrong. (The status of the proposition he expresses with regard to metaphysical modality is not relevant).
Of course, this kind of anti-reductivism is compatible with certain kind of global microphysical supervenience theses. See, for example, Sider (1998).
The version of the many minds view that we have presented—and which we are most attracted to—is one according to which psycho-semantic profile constitutes a fundamental parameter of variation—along with persistence conditions etc. There is another version of the many minds view according to which the semantic profile of an object does supervene on its intrinsic and relational non-semantic profile, so long as the latter profile includes temporal and modal facts. On that view, the difference in the semantic profile of ‘bald’ in the mouth of many coincident minds is grounded in slightly different modal/temporal profiles of the many minds. This makes the bruteness worry more pressing: how it is that such subtle variations in dispositional and temporal profiles make the difference than they do? We are not drawn to this view, but we mention it for the sake of comprehensiveness.
References
Fine, K. (1975). Vagueness, truth and logic. Synthese, 30, 265–300.
Lewis, D (1999). Many but almost one, In: Papers in metaphysics and epistemology, Cambridge University Press.
Sider, T. (1998). Global supervenience and identity across times and worlds. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 59, 913–937.
Acknowledgement
We are very grateful to Timothy Williamson and Ted Sider for helpful comments.
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Hawthorne, J., McGonigal, A. The many minds account of vagueness. Philos Stud 138, 435–440 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-007-9110-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-007-9110-3