Two of the papers up today on the philosophy papers blog are relevant to stuff I’ve been working on. And they’re both very good papers.

Neil Levy argues that the kind of non-moral cases of imaginative resistance that Yablo and I have discussed undermine an empirical argument for moral objectivism. He argues that the moral/conventional distinction that experimenters found in young children is a manifestation of a general authority-dependent/authority-independent distinction, and that distinction doesn’t have much to do with moral objectivism, since aesthetic concepts, and shape concepts, and furniture concepts can be authority-independent.

Nick Smith has a paper forthcoming in Journal of Philosophical Logic defending a theory of vagueness where the truth values are not linearly ordered. I think his theory has some rather unattractive features, which I might go into in a later post, but I think it’s an interesting theory, and certainly an important alternative to the more familiar theories of vagueness.