It is generally agreed that vague predicates like ‘red’, ‘rich’, ‘tall’, and ‘bald’, have borderline cases of application. For instance, a cloth patch whose color lies midway between a definite red and a definite orange is a borderline case for ‘red’, and an American man five feet eleven inches in height is (arguably) a borderline case for ‘tall’. The proper analysis of borderline cases is a matter of dispute, but most theorists of vagueness agree (...) at least in the thought that borderline cases for vague predicate ‘ ’ are items whose satisfaction of ‘ ’ is in some sense unclear or problematic: it is unclear whether or not the patch is red, unclear whether or not the man is tall.1 For example, Lynda Burns cites a widespread view as holding that borderline cases “are not definitely within the positive or negative extension of the predicate. … Border- line cases are seen as falling within a gap between the cases of definite application of the predicate and cases of definite application of its negation” (1995, 30). Michael Tye writes that the “concept of a border- line case is the concept of a case that is neither definitely in nor defi- nitely out” (1994b, 18). (shrink)

John Broome has argued that value incommensurability is vagueness, by appeal to a controversial about comparative indeterminacy. I offer a new counterexample to the collapsing principle. That principle allows us to derive an outright contradiction from the claim that some object is a borderline case of some predicate. But if there are no borderline cases, then the principle is empty. The collapsing principle is either false or empty.

Most philosophers of art assume that there are three categories with regard to arthood, namely ‘art’, ‘artful’ and ‘non-art’ and that, therefore, a definition must be able to account for ‘artful items’, also called ‘borderline cases of art’. This article, however, defends the thesis that, since there is no agreement over which items fall under the category ‘artful’, the ability to account for borderline cases of art should not be used as a criterion for evaluating definitions of art. (...) The defended thesis is important, not merely because it reveals that virtually all alleged descriptive definitions of art have strong recommendatory consequences, but also because the thesis has implications for the artefacts that are considered to be borderline cases of art. (shrink)

Some philosophers seem to think that borderline cases provide further cases of apparent faultless disagreement. My aim here is to argue against such a suggestion. I claim that with respect to borderline cases, people typically do not respond by taking a view—unlike what is the case in genuine cases of apparent faultless disagreement. I argue that my claim is indeed respected and actually accounted for by paradigm cases of semantic and epistemic views on the nature of vagueness. (...) And I also argue that my claim turns out to be, initial appearances notwithstanding, compatible with other claims in the literature—to the effect that, in appropriate circumstances, there are indeed, or there might well be, “macho,” admissible, forced, and hesitant responses to borderline cases. (shrink)

The rare condition known as dicephalus occurs when (prior to implantation) a zygote fails to divide completely, resulting in twins who are conjoined below the neck. Human dicephalic twins look like a two-headed person, with each brain supporting a distinct mental life. Jeff McMahan has recently argued that, because they instance two of us but only one animal, dicephalic twins provide a counterexample to the animalist's claim that each of us is identical with a human animal. To the contrary, I (...) argue that in cases of dicephalus it is obvious neither that there is one animal nor that there are two of us. Consequently, the animalist criterion does not straightforwardly apply to cases of dicephalus. I defend an account of dicephalus that is both sensitive to the complexity of twinning phenomena and not inconsistent with animalism. In my view, dicephalic twins are a borderline case of the concept HUMAN ANIMAL. I conclude with some speculative remarks concerning the normative import (if any) of my claim that dicephalic twins are a borderline case. (shrink)

In an interesting experimental study, Bonini et al. (1999) present partial support for truth-gap theories of vagueness. We say this despite their claim to find theoretical and empirical reasons to dismiss gap theories and despite the fact that they favor an alternative, epistemic account, which they call ‘vagueness as ignorance’. We present yet more experimental evidence that supports gap theories, and argue for a semantic/pragmatic alternative that unifies the gappy supervaluationary approach together with its glutty relative, the subvaluationary approach.

According to the principle of bivalence, truth and falsity are jointly exhaustive and mutually exclusive options for a statement. It is either true or false, and not both, even in a borderline case. That highly controversial claim is central to the epistemic theory of vagueness, which holds that borderline cases are distinguished by a special kind of obstacle to knowing the truth-value of the statement. But this paper is not a defence of the epistemic theory. If bivalence (...) holds, it presumably does so as a consequence of what truth and falsity separately are. One may therefore expect bivalence to be derivable from a combination of some principles characterizing truth and other principles characterizing falsity. Indeed, such derivations are easily found. Their form will of course depend on the initial characterizations of truth and falsity, and not all such characterizations will permit bivalence to be derived. In this paper we focus on the relation between its derivability and some principles about truth and falsity. We will use borderline cases for vague expressions as primary examples of an urgent.. (shrink)

When the borderline cases of art occur in non-art categories, the debate of artistic status arises not only with regard to the individual cases but also with regard to the category to which they belong. The identity of the individual case tends to be defined in connection to the category it belongs to. It tends to formulate that, if the individual case is art, then the entire category is also art, and if the category is not art, (...) then the individual case is also not art. Such a view inevitably hampers the artistic status of works arising from the non-art categories. This article argues that the individual cases and their belonging categories need not be strictly interlocking and that they could possess multiple identities depending on the context that they are present. Thus the point shifts from whether the case is or is not art in its absolute sense to ‘when’ is it art. (shrink)

It is a great pleasure to have the opportunity to contribute to this volume dedicated to the critical celebration of Stephen Schiffer’s very considerable philosophical achievements. My focus will be on his recent work on vagueness.1 The broad direction of Schiffer’s researches in this area has been to give priority to what we may call the characterisation problem: the problem of saying what the vagueness of expressions of natural language consists in or, more specifically – since Schiffer takes it as (...) a given that the vagueness he is targeting consist in a propensity of vague expressions to give rise to borderline cases —the problem of saying what being a borderline case of the concept expressed by a vague expression consists in. This has not been a main preoccupation of most of the work in the field since the vagueness “boom” started in the mid 1970s. There has been a tendency to jump straight into devising semantic theories for vague languages, usually aimed at twin desiderata of saving classical logic and dissolving the various paradoxes of vagueness, with a principal focus on the standard sorites, and occasional glances at the Forced March, and others.2 Of course, such work has inevitably implicated commitment to broad conceptions of vagueness, and of borderline cases, of various kinds. The classical epistemicist approach, for example, conceives of borderline cases as instances whose correct classification in terms of the relevant concept is, for reasons it attempts to explain, unknowable. Semantic indeterminist approaches, by contrast, tend (often implicitly) to conceive of borderline cases as items to which the concept in question neither applies nor fails to apply and as coming about because our practice with the concept leaves it, in effect, merely partially defined and so ‘gappy’. A variation on this, still semantic indeterminist, regards vagueness as consisting in a phenomenon akin to divided reference, whereby a predicate, for example, may be associated with a range of extensionally distinct best candidates to be the property it refers to; borderline cases are then items which exemplify some but not all of these properties.. (shrink)

I argue that there can be no such thing as a borderline case of the predicate ‘phenomenally conscious’: for any given creature at any given time, it cannot be vague whether that creature is phenomenally conscious at that time. I first defend the Positive Characterization Thesis, which says that for any borderline case of any predicate there is a positive characterization of that case that can show any sufficiently competent speaker what makes it a (...) class='Hi'>borderline case. I then appeal to the familiar claim that zombies are conceivable, and I argue that this claim entails that there can be no positive characterizations of borderline cases of ‘phenomenally conscious’. By the Positive Characterization Thesis, it follows that ‘phenomenally conscious’ can not have any borderline cases. (shrink)

If ‘F’ is a predicate, then ‘Fer than’ or ‘more F than’ is a corresponding comparative relational predicate. Concerning such comparative relations, John Broome’s Collapsing Principle states that, for any x and y, if it is false that y is Fer than x and not false that x is Fer than y, then it is true that x is Fer than y. Luke Elson has recently put forward two alleged counter-examples to this principle, allegedly showing that it yields contradictions if (...) there are borderline cases. In this paper, I argue that the Collapsing Principle does not rule out borderline cases, but I also argue that it is implausible. (shrink)

This open access book is about exploring interesting borderline cases of art. It discusses the cases of gustatory and olfactory artworks, proprioceptive artworks, intellectual artworks, as well as the vague limits between painting and photography. The book focuses on the author’s research about what counts as art and what does not, as well as on the nature of these limits. Overall, the author defends a very inclusive view, 'extending' the limits of art, and he argues for its virtues. Some (...) of the limits discussed concern our senses, some concern vagueness and fuzzy boundaries between different types of works of art, some concern the amount of human intention and intervention in the process of creation of an artwork, and some concern the border between art and science. In these various ways, by understanding better such borderline cases, Benovsky suggests that we get a better grip on an understanding of the nature of art. (shrink)

Who should be diagnosed with intellectual disability and who should not? For borderline cases, the answer to this question may be as difficult to decide on as determining the borderline between being bald or not. While going bald may be upsetting to some, it is also an inevitable and relatively undramatic course of nature. In contrast, getting a diagnosis of intellectual disability is likely to have more far-reaching consequences. This makes the question of where the cutoff point for (...) intellectual disability lies more imperative. Philosophy of science may help psychologists to understand the nature of this dilemma in a more profound manner. This article builds on the sorites paradox to explore the vagueness that surrounds the concept of intellectual disability and the consequences of this vagueness for the diagnostic process. While epistemicists argue that vagueness is a consequence of our limited knowledge of the world that we live in, semantic theorists claim that there is nothing that we do not know, but that our language allows for indecisiveness. What these different lines of understanding mean for psychologists who are diagnosing intellectual disability, is described in this article. Furthermore, the article discusses practical implications of these philosophical underpinnings. (shrink)

Judges have a duty to decide judicial cases, however, judicial decision will vary and will have certain characteristics depending on the kind of case at hand: this article address three kinds of judicial cases: clear cases, borderline cases and pivotal cases. The purpose: discuss if relying on these classifications is useful or not in light of the unity in judicial adjudication principle.Resumen:Los jueces tienen el deber general de resolver los casos judiciales; sin embargo, la decisión judicial variará y (...) tendrá ciertas características dependiendo del tipo de caso; son tres los tipos de casos judiciales que este artículo estudia: clear cases, borderline cases y pivotal cases. El objetivo: intentar descubrir si adoptar una de las tipologías señaladas vulnera o reafirma el principio de unidad propio de la aplicación judicial. (shrink)

http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/1808-1711.2012v16n1p179 Neste artigo, sustento que a explicação epistemicista da vagueza não pode estar inteiramente correta. Depois de analisar os aspectos principais da concepção de Williamson, proponho uma nova abordagem ao problema epistemológico dos casos fronteiriços.

n this paper I argue that the epistemicist account of vagueness cannot be entirely correct. After analysing the main features of Williamson’s view, I propose a novel approachto the epistemological problem of borderline cases.

For all post-1970s effort expended on the topic, the most central and important question about vagueness—what it is: what, specifically, something’s being a borderline case of a vague expression consists in—has seldom been tackled with the theoretical explicitness necessary if issues expectably downstream of it, like the nature of valid inference among vague statements, or the Sorites paradox, are to receive a properly motivated treatment. The great interest of Chapter V of The Things We Mean is that it (...) points the way towards a new kind of approach, according to which vagueness is constitutively a psychological phenomenon, grounded in the characteristic propositional attitudes of practitioners of vague discourse. It’s uncontroversial that a vague expression is one whose presence in a sentence contributes towards there being, at least in principle, situations which present borderline cases of its truth; for Schiffer, it is the status of such a situation as a borderline case that is grounded in the characteristic psychology of thinkers who appraise the sentence in that situation. (shrink)

For all post-1970s effort expended on the topic, the most central and important question about vagueness—what it is: what, specifically, something’s being a borderline case of a vague expression consists in—has seldom been tackled with the theoretical explicitness necessary if issues expectably downstream of it, like the nature of valid inference among vague statements, or the Sorites paradox, are to receive a properly motivated treatment. The great interest of Chapter V of The Things We Mean is that it (...) points the way towards a new kind of approach, according to which vagueness is constitutively a psychological phenomenon, grounded in the characteristic propositional attitudes of practitioners of vague discourse. It’s uncontroversial that a vague expression is one whose presence in a sentence contributes towards there being, at least in principle, situations which present borderline cases of its truth; for Schiffer, it is the status of such a situation as a borderline case that is grounded in the characteristic psychology of thinkers who appraise the sentence in that situation. (shrink)

Autistic individuals without intellectual disabilities are sometimes not diagnosed until adolescence/adulthood. Due to increased risk of co-occurring mental health problems, these individuals may initially be referred to general, mental health services and not always be identified as autistic; some may be misdiagnosed with personality disorder prior to identification of autism. To explore possible mechanisms in misdiagnosis of autism, we report on the case of a young man with severe, non-suicidal self-injury and attention deficit disorder who had been diagnosed with (...) and treated for borderline PD prior to being diagnosed with autism. Following reassessment by mental health clinicians with experience of working with autistic individuals, the patient was diagnosed with autism, ADD, and depression—but not PD. Experiences from this case suggest that presence of co-occurring NSSI, depression, and ADD, as well as lack of comprehensive assessment and lack of autism knowledge in general mental health services, may contribute to risk that autism is misdiagnosed as PD. These findings highlight the need for autism expertise in general mental health services to facilitate appropriate diagnosis for autistic individuals who encounter these services, as well as the importance of undertaking comprehensive assessments. (shrink)

In this article, I provide a phenomenological exploration of the role played by narrativity in shaping affective experience. I start by surveying and identifying different ways in which linguistic and narrative expression contribute to structure and regulate emotions, and I then expand on these insights by taking into consideration the phenomenology of borderline personality disorder. Disruptions of narrative abilities have been shown to be central to the illness, and I argue that these disruptions are at the origin of a (...) number of alterations of affective experience. In particular, I suggest that due to the narrative “fragmentation” characteristic of the disorder, the emotions experienced by borderline patients are less differentiated and have a predominantly bodily and unregulated character. (shrink)

This article defends the existence of _borderline consciousness._ In borderline consciousness, conscious experience is neither determinately present nor determinately absent, but rather somewhere between. The argument in brief is this. In considering what types of systems are conscious, we face a quadrilemma. Either nothing is conscious, or everything is conscious, or there’s a sharp boundary across the apparent continuum between conscious systems and nonconscious ones, or consciousness is a vague property admitting indeterminate cases. Assuming mainstream naturalism about consciousness, we (...) ought to reject the first three options, which forces us to the fourth, indeterminacy. Standard objections to the existence of borderline consciousness turn on the inconceivability of borderline cases. However, borderline cases are only inconceivable by an inappropriately demanding standard of conceivability. I conclude with some plausible cases and applications. (shrink)

In his Material Beings, Peter van Inwagen distinguishes two questions about parthood. What are the conditions necessary and sufficient for some things jointly to compose a whole? What are the conditions necessary and sufficient for a thing to have proper parts? The first of these, the Special Composition Question (SCQ), has been widely discussed, and David Lewis has argued that an important constraint on any answer to the SCQ is that it should not permit borderline cases of composition. This (...) is a far-reaching claim, since many plausible-seeming accounts of composition do permit borderline cases. Ned Markosian has recently directed our attention to the second, the neglected Inverse Special Composition Question (ISCQ). I will argue that those who accept Lewis’s constraint on answers to the SCQ should accept an analogous constraint on answers to the ISCQ, and I will discuss the effects of such a constraint. (shrink)

The Pyrrhonian sceptic Favorinus of Arelata personified indeterminacy, cultivating his (or her) borderline status to undermine dogmatism. Inspired by the techniques of Favorinus, I show, by example, that ‘vague’ has borderline cases. These concrete steps lead to a more abstract argument that ‘vague’ has borderline borderline cases and borderline borderline borderline cases. My specimens are intended supplement earlier non-constructive proofs of the vagueness of ‘vague’.

To accommodate vague statements and predicates, I propose an infinite-valued, non-truth-functional interpretation of logic on which the tautologies are exactly the tautologies of classical two-valued logic. iI introduce a determinacy operator, analogous to the necessity operator in alethic modal logic, to allow the definition of first-order and higher-order borderline cases. On the interpretation proposed for determinacy, every statement corresponding to a theorem of modal system T is a logical truth, and I conjecture that every logical truth on the interpretation (...) corresponds to a theorem of T. the interpretation is extended to predicate logic. A borderline case of a predicate 'F’ is neither determinately F nor determinately not-F. Traditional sorites arguments are seen to fall apart early in their gradual stepwise passage from truth to falsity. (shrink)

_The Borderline Psychotic Child_ reviews the history and evolution of the borderline diagnosis for children, both in the USA and the UK, bringing the reader up to date with current clinical opinion on the subject. Using a range of clinical case studies, the book attempts to harmonise US and UK views on borderline diagnosis in the light of new developments in theory at The Menninger Clinic, The Anna Freud Centre and The Tavistock Clinic. Providing an introduction (...) to the borderline concept, and a systematic overview of current theoretical thinking and clinical practices from leading practitioners in the field, _The Borderline Psychotic Child_ will make informative reading both for professionals and students in the field of child analysis. (shrink)

The DSM-5 Alternative Model for Personality Disorders dimensionally defines personality pathology using severity of dysfunction and maladaptive style. As the empirical literature on the clinical utility of the AMPD grows, there is a need to examine changes in diagnostic profiles and personality expression in treatment over time. Assessing these changes in individuals diagnosed with borderline personality disorder is complicated by the tendency for patients to cycle through multiple therapists over the course of treatment leaving the potential for muddled diagnostic (...) clarity and disjointed case conceptualizations. Following patient trajectories across therapists offers a unique opportunity to examine the AMPD’s sensitivity to and utility for capturing personality stability and change over time for patients with BPD. This article demonstrates the utility of the AMPD for two clinical cases in three distinct ways: highlighting heterogeneity in BPD between patients, comparing improvements in personality severity and style over time, and elucidating profile change across therapist ratings. We present two patients diagnosed with DSM-5 Section II BPD, crossing between two therapists over the course of 3 years of psychodynamic psychotherapy. Treating clinicians rated patients for their respective treatment phases using the Level of Personality Functioning Scale, capturing severity, and the Personality Inventory for the DSM-5, capturing style. AMPD diagnostic profiles differentiated patients with BPD in both severity and style, and captured within-patient change beyond within-therapist response bias. Results indicated greater improvements in personality severity while personality style remained more stable. Implications for the patients’ treatment progress and associated challenges are discussed, as are considerations for the utility of the AMPD in therapy. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: This paper argues that the so-called paradoxes of higher-order vagueness are the result of a confusion between higher-order vagueness and the distribution of the objects of a Sorites series into extensionally non-overlapping non-empty classes.

ArgumentSociologists and historians have long favored externalist over internalist accounts of practices in the clinical disciplines. This has been particularly true in the case of the so-called new patient or borderline personality, which a range of commentators have located in culturally resonant narratives of decline. I argue here that these narratives, while pleasing, do not hold up as history; most problematic is their assumption that the appearance of the borderline portends the emergence of altogether novel forms of (...) modal personhood. Internalist accounts of the category's consolidation are equally problematic in asserting a coherence and a stable referent that repeatedly proves elusive. In the end, I suggest that a complex account of disciplinary practice that attends to knowledge production in the clinical encounter supports the conclusion that the new patient was new to psychoanalysis. Whether or not he was altogether new cannot be established, undermining the critics' certitude and prophecies of decline. (shrink)

The term “vagueness” describes a property of natural concepts, which normally have fuzzy boundaries, admit borderline cases, and are susceptible to Zeno's sorites paradox. We will discuss the psychology of vagueness, especially experiments investigating the judgment of borderline cases and contradictions. In the theoretical part, we will propose a probabilistic model that describes the quantitative characteristics of the experimental finding and extends Alxatib's and Pelletier's () theoretical analysis. The model is based on a Hopfield network for predicting truth (...) values. Powerful as this classical perspective is, we show that it falls short of providing an adequate coverage of the relevant empirical results. In the final part, we will argue that a substantial modification of the analysis put forward by Alxatib and Pelletier and its probabilistic pendant is needed. The proposed modification replaces the standard notion of probabilities by quantum probabilities. The crucial phenomenon of borderline contradictions can be explained then as a quantum interference phenomenon. (shrink)

This book examines influential conceptions of sport and then analyses the interplay of challenging borderline cases with the standard definitions of sport. It is meant to inspire more thought and debate on just what sport is, how it relates to other activities and human endeavors, and what we can learn about ourselves by studying sport.

The paper develops a critical dialectic with respect to the nowadays dominant approach in the theory of vagueness, an approach whose main tenet is that it is in the nature of the vagueness of an expression to present borderline cases of application, conceived of as enjoying some kind of distinctive normative status. Borderlineness is used to explain the basic phenomena of vagueness, such as, for example, our ignorance of the location of cut-offs in a soritical series. Every particular theory (...) of vagueness exemplifying the approach makes use, in the vague object language, of a definiteness operator which, however substantially interpreted, unavoidably inherits the vagueness of the expressions on which it operates ('higher-order vagueness'). It is first argued that finite soritical series force a surprising collapse result concerning a particular set of expressions involving the definiteness operator. It is then shown that, under two highly plausible assumptions about higher-order vagueness (the existence of 'absolutely definitely' positive and negative cases and the 'radical' character of higher-order vagueness itself), the collapse result implies the inadequacy of the dominant approach as a theory of vagueness, as its main tenet can be, at best, not absolutely definitely true. (shrink)

The Uniqueness Thesis, or rational uniqueness, claims that a body of evidence severely constrains one’s doxastic options. In particular, it claims that for any body of evidence E and proposition P, E justifies at most one doxastic attitude toward P. In this paper I defend this formulation of the uniqueness thesis and examine the case for its truth. I begin by clarifying my formulation of the Uniqueness Thesis and examining its close relationship to evidentialism. I proceed to give some (...) motivation for this strong epistemic claim and to defend it from several recent objections in the literature. In particular I look at objections to the Uniqueness Thesis coming from considerations of rational disagreement (can’t reasonable people disagree?), the breadth of doxastic attitudes(can’t what is justified by the evidence encompass more than one doxastic attitude?), borderline cases and caution (can’t it be rational to be cautious and suspend judgment even when the evidence slightly supports belief?), vagueness (doesn’t the vagueness of justification spell trouble for the Uniqueness Thesis?), and degrees of belief (doesn’t a finegrained doxastic picture present additional problems for the Uniqueness Thesis?). (shrink)

Patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD) are overrepresented in compulsory inpatient care for suicide-protective reasons. Still, much evidence indicates negative effects of such care, including increased suicide risk. Clinical guidelines are contradictory, leaving clinicians with difficult ethical dilemmas when deciding on compulsory care. In this study, we analyse the arguments most commonly used in favour of compulsory care of BPD patients, to find out in what situations such care is ethically justified. The aim is to guide clinicians when deciding (...) on compulsory care for BPD patients and reduce the use of potentially harmful care. The arguments analysed are (a) the patients lack decision competence, (b) the patients lack authenticity, (c) compulsory care saves the patient from suicide, (d) compulsory care safeguards against litigation, complaints, or doctor's anxiety, (e) compulsory care is a practical solution in emergencies, and (f) it is better for the caregiver to ‘err on the safe side’. We conclude that compulsory care is not ethically justified in most cases unless the clinician has probable reason to believe that the patient lacks decision capacity by suffering from a severe mental co-morbidity and stands to benefit from such care. (shrink)

This paper is an expanded written version of my reply to Rosanna Keefe’s paper ‘Modelling higher-order vagueness: columns, borderlines and boundaries’ (Keefe 2015), which in turn is a reply to my paper ‘Columnar higher-order vagueness, or Vagueness is higher-order vagueness’ (Bobzien 2015). Both papers were presented at the Joint Session of the the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association in July, 2015. At the Joint Session meeting, there was insufficient time to present all of my points in response to Keefe’s (...) paper. In addition, the audio of the session, which is available online, becomes inaudible at the beginning of my reply to Keefe’s comments due to a technical defect. The following is a full version of my remarks. (shrink)