Elizabeth Barnes Phd Thesis
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CONCEPTUAL ROOM FOR ONTIC VAGUENESS by Barnes, Elizabeth A Thesis Submitted for the Degree of Ph.D. at the University of St. Andrews 2007 Full metadata for this item is available in the St Andrews Digital Research Repository at: https://research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk/ Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/10023/348 This item is protected by original copyright This item is licensed under a Creative Commons License i Conceptual Room for Ontic Vagueness Elizabeth Barnes A Thesis Submitted for the Degree of PhD at the University of St. Andrews 18 September 2006 ii I, Elizabeth Barnes, hereby certify that this thesis, which is approximately 60,000 words in length, has been written by me, that it is the record of work carried out by me and that it has not been submitted in any previous application for a higher degree. Date: Signature of Candidate: I was admitted as a research student in September 2004 and as a candidate for the degree of PhD in September 2004; the higher study for which this is a record was carried out at the University of St. Andrews between 2004 and 2006. Date: Signature of Candidate: I hereby certify that the candidate has fulfilled the conditions of the Resolution and Regulations appropriate for the degree of PhD in the University of St. Andrews and that the candidate is qualified to submit this thesis in application for that degree. Date: Signature of Supervisor: In submitting this thesis to the University of St. Andrews I understand that I am giving permission for it to be made available in accordance with the regulations of the University Library for the time being in force, subject to any copyright vested in the work not being affected thereby. I also understand that the title and abstract will be published, and that a copy of the work may be made and supplied to any bona fide library or research worker, that my thesis will be electronically accessible for personal or research use, and that the library has the right to migrate my thesis into new electronic forms as required to ensure continued access to the thesis. I have obtained any third-party copyright permissions that may be required in order to allow such access and migration. Date: Signature of Candidate: iii Conceptual Room for Ontic Vagueness Abstract: This thesis is a systematic investigation of whether there might be conceptual room for the idea that the world itself might be vague, independently of how we describe it. This idea – the existence of so-called ontic vagueness – has generally been extremely unpopular in the literature; my thesis thus seeks to evaluate whether this ‘negative press’ is justified. I start by giving a working definition and semantics for ontic vagueness, and then attempt to show that there are no conclusive arguments that rule out vagueness of this kind. I subsequently establish what type of arguments I think would be most effective in establishing ontic vagueness and provide some arguments of this form. I then highlight a potential worry for this type of argument, but argue that it can be circumvented. Finally, I consider the main ways that the opponent of ontic vagueness would be likely resist the arguments I have offered, and argue that these strategies of response are methodologically problematic. I conclude by claiming that ontic vagueness is a perfectly plausible ontological commitment. iv Table of Contents Introduction – 1 Outline of the chapters – 4 Acknowledgements – 7 Notes – 8 Chapter 1: What is Ontic Vagueness? - 9 Basic theory – 13 Objection to the account of precisification – 19 Objection based on a regress of semantic vagueness – 25 Objection based on the vacuity of the counterfactual – 27 Appendix: A Semantics for Ontic Vagueness – 29 Outline of the view – 30 Objections – 39 Potential extension of the model to vagueness in general – 45 Chapter 2: What’s So Bad About Ontic Vagueness – 52 Logical arguments -53 Semantic arguments – 61 Metaphysical and epistemological arguments – 74 Chapter 3: Indeterminacy, Identity, and Counterparts: Evans Reconsidered - 96 Evans’ argument – 97 The logic of determinacy – 98 Counterpart theory – 99 Counterpart theoretic analysis of Evans – 103 Objection – 105 Chapter 4: Arguing for Ontic Vagueness – 109 Colyvan on indispensability – 111 Hyde on complete descriptions – 113 Merricks on reifying words – 115 Zemach on carving out objects – 118 Tye on vague objects and sets – 120 Lowe on quantum vagueness – 121 Van Inwagen on hamster vagueness – 123 Chapter 5: Vague Properties – 128 Plentiful properties – 131 Sparse properties – 136 Nominalism -- 144 Chapter 6: Four-dimensionalism, Natural Properties, and Vagueness – 149 Vagueness in persistence – 150 The 4D solution – 152 Vagueness in 4D – 155 Objections – 159 v Chapter 7: Ontic Vagueness Without Supervenience – 171 The problem of supervenience – 172 An example of non-supervenient ontic vagueness – 178 Objections – 184 Chapter 8: Bearing the Burden: Methodological Issues in the Ontic Vagueness Debate – 195 Semantic ascent – 196 Sharp cut-offs – 202 Ontic cases can’t be vague – 216 Conclusion – 221 Conclusion – 225 Complete Bibliography – 227 1 Introduction Vagueness is everywhere. It’s in our predicates, our referring terms, even our proper names, not to mention our contexts and maybe even our beliefs. Once you start to notice it, it tends to crop up all over the place. And it makes a rather horrible mess of things. But there’s one area where most philosophers tend to agree vagueness is definitely not – the non-representational world. That’s one area of enquiry that is vagueness-safe. Vagueness, as traditionally understood, is a feature of our representations – a phenomenon that arises because we want to distinguish between big differences but can’t quite be bothered to put in the work it would take to distinguish between small differences. But when you consider the fact that a series of very small differences will add up to a big difference, you realize our representations are in serious trouble. Yet if vagueness only arises as a representational phenomenon, then it seems we’re guaranteed that the world itself, independently of how we represent it, won’t be subject to vagueness. With this in mind, philosophers have tended to greet the idea of ontic vagueness – vagueness in how things are in themselves, rather than how we describe them – with a fair amount of incredulity. Surely ‘ontic’ vagueness, the thought goes, must just be some kind of category mistake.1 Indeed, such a conclusion certainly follows from the assumption that all vagueness is representational in origin. Yet, for various reasons, that assumption can begin to look false, or at best unmotivated. Let me explain. Baldness is vague. Some men (Yule Brenner, for instance) are determinately bald and some men (the late, great Jerry Garcia is a prime example) are determinately 1 Russell (1923) first put forward this type of objection – calling ontic vagueness ‘the fallacy of verbalism’ (ascribing essentially representational features to essentially non-representational entities) – and it’s been extremely influential. 2 not bald. But then there are some men that we hedge about, of whom it seems neither obviously true to say that they’re bald nor obviously true to say that they’re not bald. These are, famously, called ‘borderline cases’ for baldness. And so far so good for the representational theory of vagueness, because it seems highly intuitive that this vagueness simply arises from the fact that we just haven’t quite decided exactly what our word ‘bald’ means. We know the paradigm cases, but there’s fuzziness at the edges that we haven’t got around to sorting out yet. But, of course, many more things are subject to vagueness than just terms like ‘bald’. What it is to be, say, a dog is also vague. It’s unclear at what point in time a certain collection of molecules started being a dog, and more specifically, a certain particular dog. Some philosophers, however – myself included – see a stark disanalogy between baldness and dogs. Baldness, it seems, is a feature which we create, which is in some sense non-natural. The world as it is in itself, independently of how we represent it, contains only men and arrangements and number of hairs. Baldness is something extra which we add on (mostly, I suspect, for the purposes of humiliation and mockery). But there’s a lurking suspicion that the case is different for things like dogs. Dogs, the thought goes, have their existence (and more importantly, their existence qua dogs) independently of how we represent them. We may carve up the world into the bald and the non-bald, but we don’t carve up the world into the dog and the non-dog. The world, it seems, handles that task itself. The distinction is a natural one. So what to make of the apparent vagueness in dogs, of the fact that certain things seem indeterminate in whether or not they count as dogs? Of course there are perfectly respectable and well-rehearsed ways of getting out of the worry. We can solve the problem of vagueness in persistence via four-dimensionalism; we can say 3 that ‘dog’ is just a phase sortal; we can situate the vagueness in semantic indecision over the use of ‘dog’; the list goes on. But what are the options if I don’t want to go in for any of these proposed solutions? What if I don’t find any of them plausible? Were I instead to take the ontic vagueness approach – i.e., dogs are vague objects – would I be descending into obvious madness? That’s the question that I’ll be exploring in this thesis – namely, is there conceptual room for ontic vagueness? That is, can ontic vagueness be an ‘option on the table’ in metaphysical debate? Let me clarify the notion of conceptual room.