Vagueness and Indirect Discourse

Noûs 34 (s1):258 - 270 (2000)
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Abstract

This paper offers a rejoinder to an argument by Schiffer against semantic accounts of vagueness (typically relying on supervaluationist techniques) based on indirect discourse. The argument, as far as I know original with Schiffer, occurs in “Two Issues of Vagueness” (Schiffer 1998). It is not addressed at supervaluationism as such, but at the philosophical account of vagueness which typically relies on it. Supervaluationism is not by itself a theory, but a logical technique with several applications. In one such application, supervaluationism serves to alleviate a tension between, on the one hand, the rejection of bivalence for some utterances which characterizes what I take to be the correct view on vagueness (vagueness as semantic indecision – ‘VSI’ henceforth –, to put it in the terms of a well-known defender of the view, David Lewis), and, on the other, well-established facts about the semantics of logical expressions. I will address Schiffer’s argument by putting forward some considerations on the concept of de re thoughts which I take to undermine it. These considerations are not ad hoc, but highly germane to VSI; or so I will try to show.

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Author's Profile

Manuel García-Carpintero
Universitat de Barcelona

References found in this work

The Varieties of Reference.Gareth Evans - 1982 - Oxford: Oxford University Press. Edited by John Henry McDowell.
Vagueness.Timothy Williamson - 1994 - New York: Routledge.
Propositional Attitudes: An Essay on Thoughts and How We Ascribe Them.Mark Richard - 1990 - Cambridge [England] ; New York: Cambridge University Press.
Distinctions Without a Difference.Vann McGee & Brian McLaughlin - 1995 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 33 (S1):203-251.

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