So _Mind_ rejected my paper on Patrick’s _Vagueness as Tolerance_. I was a little disappointed, especially since it was a relatively positive referee’s report for a rejection, but I should be able to cannabalise most of the paper for other purposes.

The two-boundary problem can be worked into the first section of the Defining Vagueness paper I’ve been sketching the last few days. The section about disjunctive Sorites arguments has already appeared in _True, Truer, Truest_ and will probably be worked into a longer paper one day on pragmatic responses to the Sorites. And the vague demonstratives point I might turn into a self-standing paper for _Analysis_ or something similar.

Still, it would have been nice to have a paper in _Mind_. I’m now 0fer something moderately large there – I think 4 or 5. On the other hand it’s been years since any other journal has turned down one of my little offerings. If I didn’t _like_ that journal I wouldn’t keep sending things there.

I thought I had a “Eureka!” moment on the weekend – suitably enough in a bathtub – but it probably wasn’t that big a deal.

Where we left off last time was trying to find a way to define vaugeness using theories whose only distinctive resources operated at the level of sentences rather than words. For instance, the epistemicist only has the distinctive operator “Is knowable (in the right kind of way)” and, at this stage, all I’ve got is the “Is as true as 0=0” and “Is less true than 0=0” operators, and they only apply to sentences. But we really want to know what _words_ are vague.

I was trying one or two fancy tricks when something very simple hit me. Let’s say that the meta-language (and ideally the object language) are partially Lagadonian, so they include entities, truth values, worlds and times (and functions built recursively from these) as names for themselves. And let’s assume (because it’s true) that these objects are not themselves vague. And remember from last time we’re still assuming, as good Montagovians, that every term denotes something. (Either an entity, or a truth value, or a world, or a time, or a function composed of the above.) Now consider the metalanguage sentences:

bq. (V) _t_ denotes L

where _t_ is a term and L is a self-naming object.

I make the following bold conjecture. For any _t_ if there exists an L such that (V) is indeterminate (however you interpret indeterminate on your preferred theory of vagueness) then _t_ is vague.

It looks all so simple, and it probably is, but I think it’s a nice move forward. Here are the things we might still worry about.

1. Is the determinacy operator defined in the extended language that includes self-naming objects?
I guess it is. Why wouldn’t it be? It would be nice to have an argument that it is though.

2. What will you do if the Montagovian assumptions turn out to be wrong and ‘very’ or ‘and’ don’t denote anything?
Panic. Hopefully at ground level because panicking at the top of St Rule’s tower could have bad consequences. Seriously, if ‘very’ and ‘and’ don’t denote something like a function, I suspect it will be very hard to give a reductive account of what it is for them to be vague.

3. Are you still thinking Fieldian/Quinean indeterminacy is just a variety of vagueness?
Yes. It would be hard work to qualify the bold conjecture in order to not have that as a consequence. And because of the ‘lumpy’ cases I don’t think it would be worthwhile.

4. Is ‘very’ vague?
Don’t know, though Daniel suggested a nice argument for it being vague. One’s prior probability that it is vague must be high, for the general metaphysical reasons that we think terms are normally vague. So conditionalising on evidence, like “There’s the North Sea” produces a high posterior probability that ‘very’ is vague. And we should believe things with high posterior probabilities. Daniel may have meant this argument somewhat flippantly.

The main thing that worries me about this move is that it is too simple. I was hoping to write a long paper on what it is to be vague, something that made me look deep and profound, but now I look like someone who believes in simplistic technical answers to substantive philosophical questions. C’est la vie.

Having said that, there is a lot to be written about a) why previous definitions are no good, b) whether this use of Lagadonian languages is permissible, c) whether I need an indeterminacy/vagueness distinction, d) whether this definition yields support for one or other substantive theories of vagueness, e) whether we can use the definition to tell whether ‘very’ really is vague or not, and f) whether this means that Trenton Merricks was right back when he said that semantic theories of vagueness turn out to be metaphysical theories of vagueness when you push them hard on their preferred metaphysics of representation, and hence whether I was wrong to criticise him over that argument. So that looks a bit like a possible paper plan, and not necessarily a superficial one, I hope.

Sadly it’s behind a subscriber wall (though you can register for free for 14 days) but in the latest “Times Higher Education Supplement”:http://www.thes.co.uk/current_edition/ has an “advice column by Simon Blackburn”:http://www.thes.co.uk/current_edition/story.aspx?story_id=2013667. The piece almost defies description. The questions are in the style of (or taken straight from?) _The Sun_ and the answers are written as if by Derrida. And to top it off the whole thing is intended as an advertisement for the Truth & Realism conference. The inventive genius of it all is hard to match, so it’s folly to even try, so…

bq.. Dear Derrida,

I’m a realist about sex but my girlfriend’s an idealist. Will we ever be compatible?

A Blogger.

Dear A,

Simon Blackburn here. Derrida couldn’t make it.

I recommend a quasi-realist solution. Even if you can’t convince your girlfriend of the merits of realism, it’s important to talk as if realism is true. So next time you’re down the pub, regale your mates with extravagent tales about how prolific and extravagent the reality of your sex life is. Some days it’s more important to talk the talk than walk the walk.

No one around here knows what it is to be a ‘blogger’, but if it’s some kind of substitute for sex we don’t think it’s a good idea. I’d say stop it or you’ll go blind.

See you in St Andrews,

Simon.

It had rained for days and everyone was getting irritable so someone suggested a game and I said, “Why don’t we play defining vagueness?” which was a splendid suggestion since we’re in St Andrews and the gold standard of papers on vagueness is Patrick Greenough’s “_Vagueness: A Minimal Theory_”:http://www3.oup.co.uk/mind/hdb/Volume_112/Issue_446/. I have my disagreements with Patrick’s paper, some of them set out “here”:http://brian.weatherson.org/cpg.pdf but it’s clearly the standard setter in this area. (I didn’t like the original gold standard either, so perhaps I’m just hard to please. And my reply paper looks insufferably _impolite_ from my current distance. Someone must have said something rude about the blog or something the week I wrote it. I will try and do better in the future.)

One of my objections to Patrick’s paper was that it only gave a definition of what it was for a predicate to be vague. And, as I’ve said once or twice before, all sorts of things can be vague. Determiners, predicate modifiers, connectives, and of course names, can all be vague. So we want a theory that handles all that. If I knew how to do that I’d be writing a paper not a blog entry, so obviously I don’t know how to solve the puzzle. But I have an idea for how to start it, and a road map as to how to end it.

Here’s the start. Assume that Montague was basically correct so we can regard all terms in the language as referential. Some terms refer to objects, some terms refer to truth values, most terms refer to functions of various kinds. And assume supervaluationism is correct. Then _t_ is vague iff _t_ refers to different things on different acceptable precisifications. That was easy!

At this point Uncle started making his usual comparisons between my philosophy and theiving and hard work, and Allan decided to “run the metaphor into a nuclear bomb crater”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Blog/Archives/004534.html and everyone complained that they hadn’t heard of this Montague fellow and besides no one who was anyone was a supervaluationist any more, so I thought I should make a list of what’s wrong with the definition.

1. It assumes Montague is right.
Well, this isn’t necessarily a mistake, because I’m perfectly happy to assume a basically Montagovian semantics if that’s what it takes. In any case, I’m not going to try and overturn Montague for the sake of a vagueness paper. Not this summer anyway.

2. It assumes supervaluationism is right.
Ah, this is the biggy. Let’s come back to it below.

3. It doesn’t distinguish between vagueness and indeterminacy.
Lots of people (e.g. Greenough, Eklund, everyone except me, etc.) think that there’s an important distinction here. Even if Hartry Field is right and “mass” is indeterminate in meaning, or if an epistemicised version of Field is right and it’s meaning is unknowable, it isn’t _vague_. Vagueness requires some kind of continuous variation between the possible referents. “Spoils to the victor!” I might say, but Uncle would point out that no one thinks I’m winning so I better not.

The main reason I disagree with everyone here is that I think there’s much more continuity between Fieldian cases and unproblematically vague terms than is usually acknowledged. The orthodox view, following Sainsbury, is that vague terms have blurry boundaries. (The blur might be metaphysical or semantic or contextual or epistemic, so this is kinda theory neitral.) And this, it is thought, distinguishes them from terms like “mass” that are at least second-order precise. I think a lot of vague terms are much lumpier, even on their vague boundaries. (What follows is _not_ meant to be a point about predicates like _early thirties_ with a vague boundary and a sharp boundary – I’m talking just about vague boundaries here.) To rehash an old example of mine, consider an appointment that was set for a vague time, like _shortly after midday_. And consider what it takes to satisfy _late for that appointment_. Many folk would think (I think) that the clock ticking from 14{3/4} past midday to 15 past midday makes a bigger difference to whether you satisfy that predicate, or determinately satisfy it, or don’t determinately not satisfy it, etc than the clock ticking from 12{1/2} to 12{3/4} past midday. In cases like this, not all steps in a Sorites are alike. It’s possible, indeed, that one of the higher-level boundaries is perfectly precise, and is precisely at 15 past midday. So I think _late for that appointment_ has a lumpy boundary, and I think it’s vague at just that boundary, so lumpy boundaries are sufficient for vagueness. And I think (though this bit is controversial) that “mass” is just an extreme case of lumpiness.

This isn’t meant to be definitive – I might tinker with the definition on this point.

4. The definition isn’t sufficiently informative.
Quick, if my definition is right, is “very” vague? I don’t know, and I’m not sure how I’d come to know. It’s not clear a definition of vagueness should let us answer these questions directly, but it isn’t clear that it shouldn’t either.

5. Defining vagueness for predicates is definition enough
The point here isn’t that things other than paradigm vague predicates are not vague. Rather, the point is that if we can generalise Delia Graff’s arguments in “Descriptions as Predicates”:http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/research/graff/papers/descriptions.pdf perhaps we can find enough ways to analyse ‘other-looking’ kinds of vagueness as predicate vagueness. But only perhaps. Delia’s arguments are very sensitive to the particular properties of descriptions, and it isn’t clear they could be, or should be, generalised. Ultimately I suspect an account of what it is for ‘if’ to be vague (if it is) or ‘and’ not to be vague (if it is not) will have to be given directly in terms of properties of connectives not properties of predicates.

Back to problem 2. There’s a hard technical problem here, and though Grannie says that technical problems always have technical solutions, I’m not at all sure where to find it. The supervaluationist, you see, provides an account of what goes on term-by-term in a vague language. Other theorists tend to operate at the level of sentences. Epistemicists talk about what sentences can and can’t be known. Many-valued theorists (including this one) talk about the truth-values of various sentences, and so on. And, as Quine pointed out, it is not trivial to extricate the meanings of words from merely the meanings (let alone from the truth values) of sentences. So even if we have an account of what sentences are vague, working out which terms are vague is hard. As I said, it’s a hard question whether “very” is vague. If I knew how to solve this problem I’d probably have written my vagueness book by now, so this is not a good omen for the success of the project sketched in this post.

It has by the way rained for days at Brian’s location, wherever in the world that happens to be. For a while I thought the theme song for this trip would be “Weather With You”. But it really has been fun and no one is getting too irritable, so perhaps Franz Ferdinand’s “Jacqueline” would be more suitable, and more Scottish.

I spent a chunk of this morning sitting in a small alcove outside St Andrews castle, gazing over the rocks to the North Sea, listening alternately to the gentle sounds of the water or to Paul Kelly on the iPod singing about other wonderful bodies of water, and, just to top it off, reading Christopher Peacocke’s _The Realm of Reason_. A more aesthetically sensitive man might have been lulled by the gentle beauty of the place into a charitable reading of Peacocke’s book. But not I! There are nits to pick, and pick them I must, for what is a blog if not a device for point-scoring against the great and the good?

Here’s his preliminary definition of a priori.

bq. A content is a priori if a thinker can be entitled to accept it without that entitlement being constitutively dependent upon the content of her perceptual experiences of other conscious states.

This seems to include too much by way of introspective knowledge. I know right now that most of my major organs are basically functioning properly. I know this not because of anything one would ordinary call perception, let alone the _contents_ of those perceptions, nor because of any conscious state I’m in, but because I’m not getting any warning signals from those organs, and usually they do tell me if they are not working well. I wish the warnings would come in the form of 8 inch letters splashed across my visual field, e.g. “LEFT LEG BROKEN – DON’T WALK ON IT” rather than via annoying pains, but the warning system is mostly functional. Nevertheless, that my major organs are not working is something I’m entitled right now to believe on the basis largely of sub-conscious introspection, but it’s not something to which I’m entitled a priori.

More generally, Peacocke’s definition overlooks just how big a role sub-conscious introspection plays in our day-to-day, and more particularly second-to-second, self-monitoring and self-adjustment. I think the process of doing this monitoring and adjustment gives us entitlement to all sorts of _de se_ contents, but I don’t think any of it is a priori. Maybe this is all meant to count as perception in Peacocke’s book, but I think it’s a misleading (at best) to call all of this perception if that’s the intent.

Much more Peacocke marginalia to come I fear.

My fascination with the local supermarket selling “The TLS”:http://www.the-tls.co.uk/ continues unabated. And this week there’s a great big map of Australia on the cover. So it’s not only the weather over here that reminds me of home. But sadly some of the articles inside concern not a real Australia but a fictional place of the same name.

Take, for instance, David Oderberg’s “review of Jim Franklin’s _Corrupting the Youth_”:http://www.the-tls.co.uk/this_week/story.aspx?story_id=2107506. It’s allegedly a history of philosophy in Australia. But since it says, and from the context of Oderberg’s quote he apparently agrees, that “Sydney is no longer a city where a student can find a respectable course of study in philosophy”, it’s hard to credit that it is about the city we all know and love.

If this is meant to be a claim about real-world Sydney, it’s one of the adjectival stupidest things I’ve seen written in a long time. Any city that employs David Braddon-Mitchell, Peter Menzies, Huw Price, Caroline West, Stephen Hetherington and many many other fine philosophers is a city where one can find a respectable course of study in philosophy. (To be sure, I’m not confident Huw teaches that much on his current deal, but he is around the department and that often helps as much as actual teaching, especially with the grad students.) Sydney as a philosophical city could be better in many ways, I could be there for instance, but Franklin’s claim reveals a staggering ignorance of the strength of the current generation of philosophers.

On a not quite unrelated point, it’s not clear just how wide a scope a study of Australian philosophy should have. In particular, should it include the diaspora? There are over a million Australians abroad, and many of us are philosophers, and some quite prominent philosophers. Franklin’s book is basically about Sydney so it doesn’t include any reference to the diaspora (from the review it sounds like it barely mentions Canberra, so New York and Edinburgh are out of the question I guess) but I think it probably should have.

As “Kieran noted yesterday”:http://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002007.html I’ve been gallavanting around the world (most recently into St Andrews) so I haven’t had time to promote the latest round of philosophy blogs. Actually there have been two big group blogs launched since the Arizona blog Kieran linked to. I was going to try and make a systematic list, but that’s hard work away from one’s home computer, so I’ll just link to David Chalmers’s very good “list of philosophy blogs”:http://jamaica.u.arizona.edu/~chalmers/weblogs.html instead.

Unlike Crooked Timber, most of these blogs are geographically based. The contributors to group blogs are usually from the same time zone, and frequently from the same zip code. I prefer CT’s cosmopolitan flavour, but that isn’t looking like becoming the dominant form of blogging. That’s a pity, because the real attraction of the medium, to me anyway, is that it helps overcome the tyrannies of distance. Hopefully active comment boards and crosslinks can do that even if the blogs themselves are spatially centralised.

A few quick thoughts while pondering the remarkable recuperative qualities of Scottish merchandise and wondering whether it’s acceptable to leave party’s in daylight on account of the unreasonably early sunrises here.

Very casual observation has convinced me that there’s even less chance than I thought there was two days ago of giving a general theory of humour. Just watching what things are funny in everyday life seems to suggest that they really have nothing at all in common. Josh suggested that maybe a massively disjunctive theory would be possible, and it might be, though I bet any such theory I tried to write would overgenerate dramatically.

I presented the “truer paper”:http://brian.weatherson.org/ttt.pdf at Arch{e’} yesterday and there was widespread feeling that Cian’s objection was rather more pressing than I was prepared to acknowledge. Cian’s objection is that the inference rule A, ¬B therefore A is truer than B is plausible, but it is inadmissible in my system. Maybe I’ll have to write something up specifically on why it’s not an absolute disaster that this is inadmissible in my theory.

Arch{e’} has been so good for my workrate that I’ve already written a paper while here. It’s my reply to John Hawthorne’s recent paper on Humeans in _No{u^}s_. Admittedly it’s just a tidying up of an old blogpost, and I don’t have the references and it reads more like a first draft than the second draft it really should be, and some of the attributions might be mistaken (I was doing some of the credits from memory) but still it’s a draft and that’s a good thing.

bq. “Humeans aren’t out of their minds, unless everyone is”:http://brian.weatherson.org/jhdh.pdf

Here’s a picture Tamar took of me in northern Hungary.

bq. !- http://brian.weatherson.org/hungary.jpeg 192×144!

I’m not the most photogenic person in the world I’m afraid, so this might be the last photo of me to go on here for a while.

Matt Haber (UC Davis) has sent me the following announcement about a “Philosophy of Biology Workshop”:http://www.ishpssb.org/workshop2004/ in San Francisco this September. For anyone who is interested there are more details at that link or below the fold.
Continue reading →

After a wonderful few days in Budapest, I just arrived in St Andrews to loll about at Arch{e’} and eventually attend the “Truth and Realism Conference”:http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~pmg2/provisional.htm. I was at Safeway this morning to stock up on soft drink and other essential supplies and I noticed that they stocked “TLS”:http://www.the-tls.co.uk/ at the supermarket. I was recently commissioned to write something for TLS so this was moderately exciting. The thought that I could be so mainstream that I’d be writing something for a supermarket tabloid!

This week’s edition featured a very good, if scathing, review by Tim Crane of F. H. Buckley’s _The Morality of Laughter_. Sadly it isn’t online so I can’t link to it, but Tim does a remarkable job of taking apart the book’s main theses in a short space. Of course it’s impossibly hard to write decent philosophical prose about comedy (Ted Cohen’s “widely-praised book”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0226112306/ref%3Dnosim/caoineorg-20/002-7058737-1784850 perhaps being the only exception) so maybe Buckley shouldn’t be blamed too much. Or perhaps he (I think it’s he) should be blamed for the choice of topic.

If I was to write on comedy one of the problems I’d find is that I really can’t come up with anything approaching a _joke_. That isn’t to say I never generate anything funny – I hope there’s at least one or two things on this blog over the years that have been at least moderately amusing – but never with the structure of a joke. And witty observations in the context of larger conversations make not ideal examples for a philosophical study. But that’s hardly the only problem. There’s also the fact that the subject is too hard for my poor skills, as this story illustrates.

A few years ago I was watching a cricket game in which Glenn McGrath, as usual, was fielding on the boundary. Now McGrath, for the non-cricket watchers in the audience, is a tall gangly guy from outback New South Wales who does precisely two things well on the cricket field: bowl the ball and throw the ball. Indeed his bowling and throwing are as good as anyone to ever play the game. But things that involve more, or different, kinds of coordination are usually impossible for someone with his frame and ability. Usually, but not on this day. A ball was lofted into the outfield quite a way from where McGrath was fielding, and he took off in a dead sprint around the boundary, getting close enough that he could dive for the ball as it fell to the ground, and at full extension took a spectacular one-handed catch. When the camera panned back to his teammates around the pitch, who would usually be applauding such fine fielding, they were all having uncontrollable fits of laughter. As was entirely appropriate; it really was one of the _funniest_ things one could hope to see on a sporting field. Why is that? Well in part it’s because even at his finest fielding moment McGrath was still more than a little awkward-looking. And in part it’s because it was so unexpected that he would do something so spectacular. But plenty of slightly awkward, rather unexpected things are not funny at all, or are at best mildly amusing. Why was this different? I really don’t know, and I’m certainly not going to attempt writing on humour until that’s the kind of question I can answer.

After a wonderful few days in Budapest, I just arrived in St Andrews to loll about at Arch{e’} and eventually attend the “Truth and Realism Conference”:http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~pmg2/provisional.htm. I was at Safeway this morning to stock up on soft drink and other essential supplies and I noticed that they stocked “TLS”:http://www.the-tls.co.uk/ at the supermarket. I was recently commissioned to write something for TLS so this was moderately exciting. The thought that I could be so mainstream that I’d be writing something for a supermarket tabloid!

This week’s edition featured a very good, if scathing, review by Tim Crane of F. H. Buckley’s _The Morality of Laughter_. Sadly it isn’t online so I can’t link to it, but Tim does a remarkable job of taking apart the book’s main theses in a short space. Of course it’s impossibly hard to write decent philosophical prose about comedy (Ted Cohen’s “widely-praised book”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0226112306/ref%3Dnosim/caoineorg-20/002-7058737-1784850 perhaps being the only exception) so maybe Buckley shouldn’t be blamed too much. Or perhaps he (I think it’s he) should be blamed for the choice of topic.

If I was to write on comedy one of the problems I’d find is that I really can’t come up with anything approaching a _joke_. That isn’t to say I never generate anything funny – I hope there’s at least one or two things on this blog over the years that have been at least moderately amusing – but never with the structure of a joke. And witty observations in the context of larger conversations make not ideal examples for a philosophical study. But that’s hardly the only problem. There’s also the fact that the subject is too hard for my poor skills, as this story illustrates.

A few years ago I was watching a cricket game in which Glenn McGrath, as usual, was fielding on the boundary. Now McGrath, for the non-cricket watchers in the audience, is a tall gangly guy from outback New South Wales who does precisely two things well on the cricket field: bowl the ball and throw the ball. Indeed his bowling and throwing are as good as anyone to ever play the game. But things that involve more, or different, kinds of coordination are usually impossible for someone with his frame and ability. Usually, but not on this day. A ball was lofted into the outfield quite a way from where McGrath was fielding, and he took off in a dead sprint around the boundary, getting close enough that he could dive for the ball as it fell to the ground, and at full extension took a spectacular one-handed catch. When the camera panned back to his teammates around the pitch, who would usually be applauding such fine fielding, they were all having uncontrollable fits of laughter. As was entirely appropriate; it really was one of the _funniest_ things one could hope to see on a sporting field. Why is that? Well in part it’s because even at his finest fielding moment McGrath was still more than a little awkward-looking. And in part it’s because it was so unexpected that he would do something so spectacular. But plenty of slightly awkward, rather unexpected things are not funny at all, or are at best mildly amusing. Why was this different? I really don’t know, and I’m certainly not going to attempt writing on humour until that’s the kind of question I can answer.