(Ebook) Vagueness and thought 1st Edition by Andrew Bacon ISBN 019178026X 9780191780264

(Ebook) Vagueness and thought 1st Edition by Andrew Bacon ISBN 019178026X 9780191780264

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ISBN 10: 019178026X 
ISBN 13: 9780191780264
Author: Andrew Bacon

Vagueness is the study of concepts that admit borderline cases: the property of being bald is vague because there are people who are neither definitely bald, nor definitely not bald. The epistemology of vagueness concerns the sorts of attitudes we ought to have towards propositions we know to be borderline. Is it possible to discover whether a borderline bald man is bald? Could two people with access to the same facts reasonably disagree about whether he is bald? Does it matter, when making practical decisions, whether he is bald? By drawing on such considerations, Andrew Bacon develops a novel theory of vagueness in which vagueness is fundamentally a property of propositions, and is explicated in terms of its role in thought. On this theory, language plays little role in explaining the central puzzles of vagueness. Part I of the book outlines some of the central questions regarding the logic and epistemology of vagueness, and criticizes some extant approaches to them. Part II concerns issues in the epistemology of vagueness, touching on the ramifications of vague thoughts on the study of evidence, ignorance, desire, probability theory, and decision theory. By examining the effects of vague information on one's beliefs about the precise, a positive theory of vagueness is proposed. Part III concerns the logic of vagueness, including the interaction between vagueness and modality, vague identity, and the paradoxes of higher-order vagueness. Bacon suggests that some familiar philosophical notions -- including the concept of a fundamental proposition, a possible world and a precisification -- need to be revised.

(Ebook) Vagueness and thought 1st Table of contents:

PART I: Background
1: Non-Classical and Nihilistic Approaches
1.1 Responding to the Sorites
1.2 Weakening Classical Logic
1.3 Nihilism
2: Classical Approaches: An Overview of the Current Debate
2.1 Epistemicism and Supervaluationism
2.2 Does Vagueness Involve Ignorance?
2.3 Does Vagueness Involve Truth Value Gaps?
2.4 Many Interpretations or One?
2.5 Is Validity Local or Global?
3: An Outline of a Theory of Propositional Vagueness
3.1 Is Vagueness Linguistic?
3.2 Booleanism
3.3 The Epistemology of Vagueness
3.4 Probabilism
3.5 Logical Features
3.6 Vagueness-Related Uncertainty as a Special Sort of PsychologicalAttitude
PART II: Epistemological Matters
4: Vagueness and Language
4.1 Grammar
4.2 Parameters
4.3 Can One Explain Propositional Borderlineness in Terms of Sentential Borderlineness?
4.4 Quantifying In
4.5 Vague Objects
4.6 Montague’s Paradox
4.7 More Vague Propositions than Sentences
4.8 Vagueness and the Objects ofThought
5: Vagueness and Ignorance
5.1 In Favour of Vague Propositions
5.2 Explaining Ignorance about the Vague
5.2.1 Explaining ignorance via metalinguistic safety principles
5.3 Denying Ignorance about the Vague
5.3.1 The fine-grained no-ignorance view
5.3.2 The coarse-grained no-ignorance view
5.3.3 Non-linguistic behaviour
5.3.4 The contextualist no-ignorance view
5.3.5 More on non-linguistic behaviour
6: Vagueness and Evidence
6.1 Inexact Evidence
6.2 Updating on Vague Evidence
6.2.1 Conditioning on a precise proposition
6.2.2 Jeffrey conditioning
6.2.3 Conditioning on a vague proposition
6.2.4 Evidence for the whereabouts of cutoff points
6.3 A Principle of Plenitude for Vague Propositions
6.4 Evidential Roles and Degrees of Truth
7: Probabilism, Assertion, and Higher-Order Vagueness
7.1 Field’s Theory
7.2 Uncertainty in the Face of Higher-Order Vagueness
7.2.1 Vagueness and assertion
7.2.2 The role of borderlineness
7.2.3 The forced march sorites
7.2.4 Paradoxes of higher-order vagueness
7.3 Should Our Credences in the Vague Obey the Probability Calculus?
7.3.1 Dutch book arguments
7.3.2 Comparative probability judgements
7.3.3 Is there anything special about vagueness-related uncertainty?
8: Vagueness and Uncertainty
8.1 Expressivism about Vagueness
8.2 Disagreements about Morals, Conditionals, and Epistemic Modals
8.3 Do All Rational Disagreements about the Vague Boil Down to Disagreements about the Precise?
9: Vagueness and Decision
9.1 Vagueness and DecisionTheory
9.2 Vagueness and Action
9.3 Vagueness and Preferences
9.4 Probability in theAbsence of Uncertainty
10: Vagueness and Desire
10.1 The View that Vagueness is Merely a Kind of Ignorance
10.2 The Indifference Principle
10.3 Caring about the Vague
10.4 Is it Always Possible to Articulate your Desires Using Precise Language?
PART III: Logical Matters
11: Vague Propositions
11.1 Fineness of Grain
11.2 Individuation Conditions
11.3 ATheory of Propositions
11.4 Moderately Fine-GrainedTheories of Content
12: Vagueness and Precision
12.1 Borderlineness as Primitive
12.1.1 The modal characterization of precision
12.1.2 Supervaluationism
12.1.3 Degeneracy
12.1.4 Doxastic features of vague propositions
12.2 Are the Propositions of Physics Precise?
12.3 Vagueness as Primitive
12.3.1 Determinacy operators
13: Symmetry Semantics
13.1 WhereThings Stand so Far
13.2 Symmetries
13.3 Vagueness and Precision
13.4 A Semantical Account of Precisionin Terms of Symmetries
13.4.1 Higher-order vagueness
13.4.2 Determinacy and necessity
14: Vagueness and the World
14.1 Factual Propositions and Supervaluationism
14.2 The Problem of Higher-Order Vagueness
14.2.1 Factual propositions
14.2.2 Fundamental propositions
14.3 Vagueness All theWay Down
15: Vagueness and Modality
15.1 The Interaction of Vagueness and Modality
15.2 The Proper Logic of Vagueness and Modality
15.3 The Supervenience of the Vague on the Precise
15.4 A RepresentationTheorem?
16: Vague Objects
16.1 Vagueness Throughout the Type Hierarchy
16.2 Vague Identity
16.3 Vague Parthood
16.4 Vague Objects
17: Beyond Vagueness
17.1 Semantic Indecision
17.2 Can We Get By without Semantic Indecision?
17.3 An Account of Semantic Indecision
17.4 Concluding Remarks
18: Appendices
18.1 Appendix A
18.2 Appendix B
Bibliography

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