The philosophy papers blog is up, with a new paper by Peter Godfrey-Smith on folk psychology, and new entries in my two most reliable sources, the Stanford Encyclopaedia and the Notre Dame Reviews, today both publishing on ethics.

Some informants tell me that Midwest might be close to an example of a vague term with some sharp boundaries. Close, because these informants say that while Midwest actually has no sharp boundaries, Determinately Midwest does. In particular the Ohio-Pennsylvania border is such a boundary. Everywhere in Ohio is determinately part of the Midwest, and nowhere in Pennsylvania is determinately part of it. Some parts of western Pennsylvania may be penumbral cases, Pittsburgh some say is a paradigm penumbral case, but nowhere is determinately in.

Things might be even more interesting towards the northern edge of that border. Arguably, everywhere in New York is determinately not part of the Midwest, though everywhere in Western Pennsylvania is penumbrally Midwestern. In that case, as I was driving along Highway 90 Sunday, listening to Odysseus’s tale of his trip to Hell and back, I crossed two sharp, and knowable, boundaries associated with the vague term Midwest. The first such boundary is the Ohio-Pennsylvania border, where one crosses from the determinate cases to the penumbra, and the second the Pennsylvania-New York border where one crosses from the penumbra to the determinate non-cases.

I suspect this is all exceptionally good news for supervaluational-like theories (like mine!) and bad news for epistemic theories, but I can’t quite yet see how that argument is going to run.

UPDATE: I should have thanked Andy Egan for alerting me to the interesting cases here. Er, consider that belatedly done.