The vagueness
experiment is still running, though I guess most people reading this will
have taken it by now. The score right now is 26-3 in favour of sticking with
the first answer you give. I should stress that I don’t think this undermines
all the empirical claims made by contextualists about vagueness, or even any of
the claims made by all contextualists about vagueness. One different experiment
would have been to randomly start people at either end of a Sorites sequence
and walk them through it until they change their answer. Contextualists predict
that where people change their answer will be a function of which end they
start at, because there’s a bias to answer consecutive questions the same way.
That could be right, in fact I think it probably is, though it would be
interesting to test it.

UPDATE: It’s now 26-4. Is it fair to point
out that the last two votes in favour of changing one’s mind have come from
Cornell and St Andrews, two known locales of contextualists?

The vagueness
experiment is still running, though I guess most people reading this will
have taken it by now. The score right now is 26-3 in favour of sticking with
the first answer you give. I should stress that I don’t think this undermines
all the empirical claims made by contextualists about vagueness, or even any of
the claims made by all contextualists about vagueness. One different experiment
would have been to randomly start people at either end of a Sorites sequence
and walk them through it until they change their answer. Contextualists predict
that where people change their answer will be a function of which end they
start at, because there’s a bias to answer consecutive questions the same way.
That could be right, in fact I think it probably is, though it would be
interesting to test it.

UPDATE: It’s now 26-4. Is it fair to point
out that the last two votes in favour of changing one’s mind have come from
Cornell and St Andrews, two known locales of contextualists?