A defense of indeterminism

Acta Analytica 17 (2):75-82 (2002)
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Abstract

My goal is to defend the indeterminist approach to vagueness, according to which a borderline vague utterance is neither true nor false. Indeterminism appears to contradict bivalence and the disquotational schema for truth. I agree that indeterminism compels us to modify each of these principles. Kit Fine has defended indeterminism by claiming that ordinary ambiguous sentences are neither true nor false when one disambiguation is true and the other is false. But even if Fine is right about sentences, his point does not seem to generalize to utterances. What the indeterminist needs -- and what ordinary ambiguity does not provide -- is an ambiguous utterance where what is being said is indeterminate between two different propositions. I will show that such cases exist. These cases imply that the modifications that indeterminism makes to bivalence and the disquotational schema are required independently of indeterminism, in fact independently of vagueness.

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References found in this work

Vagueness.Timothy Williamson - 1994 - New York: Routledge.
Vagueness, truth and logic.Kit Fine - 1975 - Synthese 30 (3-4):265-300.
Vagueness: A Reader.Rosanna Keefe & Peter Smith (eds.) - 1996 - MIT Press.
Vagueness.Loretta Torrago - 1998 - Philosophical Review 107 (4):637.

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