Division of Humanities Seminar - There is no branching indeterminacy

Abstract:

Vagueness, or indeterminacy, has several disputed explanations. One popular view is that vagueness is due to semantic indecision. If it is indeterminate whether Mary and Beth are friends, this is because there are several relations which we could mean by ‘friendship’, but we have not decided among them.

 We could precisify our language in different ways, each precisification corresponding to a decision. It is then definitely true that Mary and Beth are friends if it is true on all precisification, or valuations – it is supervaluationally true.  Thus, indeterminacy is really multiplicity, multiplicity of possible meanings.

 An opposing idea is that in some cases there is indeterminacy which cannot be so explained. There is a single relation of friendship, for example, but it is indeterminate whether Mary and Beth are friends because it is ‘fuzzy’ in some way so that there is no saying what the case is.  For example, A mountain may seem to have fuzzy boundaries, and not that there are many overlapping objects, each with equal right to be called the mountain.

 This paper defends the thesis that indeterminacy is multiplicity against a challenge which appeals to examples including that of the mountain. My conclusion is that there is no reason to deny that the sort of puzzles discussed can be explained appealing only to a combination of (a) determinate multiplicity, (b) the linguistic thesis that counting is sometimes not by strict identity and (c) supervaluationism.

Biography:

Harold Noonan is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Birmingham. He was educated at the University of Cambridge, and taught at the University of Birmingham between 1979 and 2004, before which he was a Research Fellow at Trinity Hall College, Cambridge. His principal teaching and research interests include the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language (especially reference); identity and personal identity; philosophical logic; and the philosophies of Frege, Russell and Hume. During the first semester of 2007-08 he held a Mind Association Fellowship.