Last week I had been thinking about predicates that despite being vague were in a fairly strict sense intolerant, because sometimes a minute change is enough to determinately, clearly, knowably whatever change whether they apply. And yesterday for one reason or another I was thinking about dating, mostly about whether the predicate still applied to two people who were married. (It’s rather hard to say actually, whether it does. On the one hand, it’s odd to say They stopped dating by getting married and on the other it would be odd to include on a list of, say, professors who are dating grad students the professor who is married to a grad student. Presumably one of these oddities is broadly Gricean and the other is semantic, and at first glance I don’t have a clue as to which is which.)

Anyway, I just realised I should have put my thoughts together. For dating is clearly vague. It can be very indeterminate sometimes when two people start dating, when they stop, or whether they have ever started or stopped. But quite often, perhaps more commonly, these things have very sharp boundaries. Generally, it is a very intolerant relation. I was going to run through several of the ways that relationships can end abruptly and determinately, but I’m trying to stay away from the morbid this month. I’m sure you can think of plenty for yourself. These relationships might be distressing for all involved, but they are philosophically marvellous, for they are examples of dating being intolerant.

The only philosophically interesting point here is that unlike the examples I have previously run with (early thirties, small integer, etc) dating is lexically unstructured. For a while I suspected that all the intolerant vague terms would turn out to be structured, but this seems to be false. On the other hand, this is not a counterexample to the suggestion (made independently by Matti Eklund and Matt Weiner in response to my earlier posts) that we can rescue the vagueness=tolerance thesis by defining what it is for a predicate to be tolerant in an interval, and then saying vague predicates are those that are tolerant over interval some of whose members satisfy the predicate and some of whose members do not. Clearly vagueness does not require tolerance everywhere, but I don’t have a conclusive argument against the claim it requires tolerance somewhere.

UPDATE: Oops! This isn’t really a case of vagueness without tolerance after all. As Dave Chalmers pointed out to me, what really goes on here is that very large changes can take place in a very short amount of time. I had confused tolerance-with-respect-to-time with tolerance-with-respect-to-underlying-properties. If my legs get chopped off I can go from tall to not-tall in an instant, but that doesn’t make tall intolerant. The problem was that I saw what I thought was an example to help my case, noticed that I could have unlimited amusement writing up the illustrations of it, and then didn’t stop to check whether the example actually worked. (The puns on tolerant crossed with puns on the names of the characters involved could have been something else.)

I don’t normally have to confess that I got something wrong here, at least not this quickly, but I just got this wrong.

Last week I had been thinking about predicates that despite being vague were in a fairly strict sense intolerant, because sometimes a minute change is enough to determinately, clearly, knowably whatever change whether they apply. And yesterday for one reason or another I was thinking about dating, mostly about whether the predicate still applied to two people who were married. (It’s rather hard to say actually, whether it does. On the one hand, it’s odd to say They stopped dating by getting married and on the other it would be odd to include on a list of, say, professors who are dating grad students the professor who is married to a grad student. Presumably one of these oddities is broadly Gricean and the other is semantic, and at first glance I don’t have a clue as to which is which.)

Anyway, I just realised I should have put my thoughts together. For dating is clearly vague. It can be very indeterminate sometimes when two people start dating, when they stop, or whether they have ever started or stopped. But quite often, perhaps more commonly, these things have very sharp boundaries. Generally, it is a very intolerant relation. I was going to run through several of the ways that relationships can end abruptly and determinately, but I’m trying to stay away from the morbid this month. I’m sure you can think of plenty for yourself. These relationships might be distressing for all involved, but they are philosophically marvellous, for they are examples of dating being intolerant.

The only philosophically interesting point here is that unlike the examples I have previously run with (early thirties, small integer, etc) dating is lexically unstructured. For a while I suspected that all the intolerant vague terms would turn out to be structured, but this seems to be false. On the other hand, this is not a counterexample to the suggestion (made independently by Matti Eklund and Matt Weiner in response to my earlier posts) that we can rescue the vagueness=tolerance thesis by defining what it is for a predicate to be tolerant in an interval, and then saying vague predicates are those that are tolerant over interval some of whose members satisfy the predicate and some of whose members do not. Clearly vagueness does not require tolerance everywhere, but I don’t have a conclusive argument against the claim it requires tolerance somewhere.

UPDATE: Oops! This isn’t really a case of vagueness without tolerance after all. As Dave Chalmers pointed out to me, what really goes on here is that very large changes can take place in a very short amount of time. I had confused tolerance-with-respect-to-time with tolerance-with-respect-to-underlying-properties. If my legs get chopped off I can go from tall to not-tall in an instant, but that doesn’t make tall intolerant. The problem was that I saw what I thought was an example to help my case, noticed that I could have unlimited amusement writing up the illustrations of it, and then didn’t stop to check whether the example actually worked. (The puns on tolerant crossed with puns on the names of the characters involved could have been something else.)

I don’t normally have to confess that I got something wrong here, at least not this quickly, but I just got this wrong.