Vagueness And The Sorites Paradox

Ludwig, Kirk; Ray, Greg

doi:10.1111/1468-0068.36.s16.16

Cited by 7 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…Ludwig and Lepore confront this problem explicitly when it comes to vagueness. In the treatment of Vagueness in Ludwig and Lepore 2004 the authors suggest a view endorsed in Ludwig and Ray 2002, on which no sentence containing a vague term can be true, because vague terms are “semantically incomplete” and semantically incomplete terms can’t appear in true sentences. Ludwig and Lepore note that as with the semantic paradoxes, the untruth of the T‐theory doesn’t prevent it from playing its role in generating an M‐theory, and allow that this can involve having false yet interpretive axioms 12 .…”

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confidence: 99%

Inconsistency Theories of Semantic Paradox

Patterson

2009

Philos Phenomenol Research

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It is argued that a certain form of the view that the semantic paradoxes show that natural languages are “inconsistent” provides the best response to the semantic paradoxes. After extended discussions of the views of Kirk Ludwig and Matti Eklund, it is argued that in its strongest formulation the view maintains that understanding a natural language is sharing cognition of an inconsistent semantic theory for that language with other speakers. A number of aspects of this approach are discussed and a few objections are entertained.

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confidence: 99%

Inconsistency Theories of Semantic Paradox

Patterson

2009

Philos Phenomenol Research

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“…Peter Unger (1979a, 1979b, 1979c, 1980), Wheeler (e.g. 1975, 1979, Heller (1990), Ludwig and Ray (2002), and Braun and Sider (2007) is often mentioned alongside incoherentist views. (Williamson (1994), ch.…”

Section: Incoherentismmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…35 Other relatively recent theorists who have held that vagueness implies emptiness or lack of truth include Wheeler (e.g. 1975, 1979), Heller (1990), Ludwig and Ray (2002), and Braun and Sider (2007). tolerance comes 'close enough'.…”

Section: Related Viewsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Incoherentism and the Sorites Paradox

2019

The Sorites Paradox

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The classic reference is Fine (1975). See also Keefe (2000). 2 See MacFarlane (2016) for a recent approach of this kind. We may then say that a given language is inconsistent exactly if competence with all elements of that language involves dispositions to accept things that are inconsistent with each other. Talk of language being inconsistent hardly has a pretheoretically clear meaning. I am using the locution partly stipulatively. The account of competence just sketched does not by itself say anything about the semantic values of the expressions of an inconsistent language. One perhaps natural suggestion would be that when the rules governing an expression are inconsistent, then the expression simply lacks a semantic value (or it has a trivial semantic value: for example, a predicate would be empty). I see two problems with this. First, this seems implausibly radical: it yields that nothing is old, or red, or a mountain, etc. Anyone who embraces this radical idea is apt to want to draw a distinction between assertible and non-assertible sentences of, for example, the form '___ is old', and so mitigate the problem by saying that those of these sentences we would take to be true are at least assertible. However, deciding under what conditions sentences are assertible presents much the same problems as deciding under what conditions they are true, and supposing one can come up with a satisfactory theory of assertibility, why not simply use that also as a theory of truth? Second, a different problem is that the incoherence is holistic. It is not just the rules for one expression

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“…22 22 Ludwig and Ray (2002) do not agree that semantic vocabulary is vague; they claim that ‘applies’ (as in “The term ‘bald’ applies to Bob”) is precise. (This claim is crucial to their attempted proof of semantic nihilism (2002, appendix).)…”

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“…Thus our notion of validity simpliciter differs from the supervaluationist's notion of validity, which entails that all valid sentences are true (that is, supertrue). Ludwig and Ray (2002, pp. 444–46) also invoke the concept of validity under all precisifications.…”

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Vague, So Untrue

Braun

Sider

2007

Nous

111

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According to an old and attractive view, vagueness must be eliminated before semantic notions (truth, implication, and so on) may be applied. This view-call it semantic nihilism-was accepted by Frege, but is rarely defended nowadays. 1 This recent neglect is unjustified: the thorny nest of problems surrounding vagueness is best untangled by accepting something like the old Fregean view.If semantic notions such as truth apply only to completely precise sentences, they do not apply to English or any other natural language. Thus, almost no English sentences are true (or false). We defend this seemingly radical and self-refuting conclusion by developing a theory of how vagueness is typically and harmlessly ignored.Section one sets out semantic nihilism. Section two argues for its superiority to the structurally similar theory of supervaluationism. 2 Section three concerns truth.

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Vagueness And The Sorites Paradox

Cited by 7 publications

References 25 publications

Inconsistency Theories of Semantic Paradox

Inconsistency Theories of Semantic Paradox

Incoherentism and the Sorites Paradox

Vague, So Untrue

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