New APPS

My co-writer* Joshua Heller is currently working on a project connections between vagueness literature, literature on semantic underdetermination, and new work on metaphysical indeterminacy.**

One thing we're both interested in exploring the next few weeks is the extent to which Evans' argument against ontic vagueness applies to either semantic underdetermination or metaphysical indeterminacy. But I'm about ten years out of date on the vagueness literature. The last time I dipped my toe in this, it seemed like everyone was trying to save supervaulationism from Williamson's criticisms about wide and narrow entailment and from the charge that it has no advantages over three valued systems with respect to modelling higher order vagueness. I didn't think there was any consensus on Evans' argument
then.

Is there now anything approaching a consensus among people working on vagueness about Evans' argument? If so, what should I read? Have any of the new people working on metaphysical indeterminacy or semantic underdetermination said anything interesting about Evans' argument?

My interest in this is somewhat historical. In this paper, Frankie Worrell and I argue that most people are misreading the actual point of Russell's famous paper. It was not to propose a given view of vagueness, but rather to undermine British Idealist views of vagueness. In the Idealist tradition precision was often thought of as being introduced by the conceptual upon a vague reality (speaking very loosely here, precision would require going into the agonies of the intuition/concept distinction in the Idealist tradition). Russell never gives an argument for the view that vagueness is merely a facet of representational apparatus, but as far as I can tell the view just fit the linguistic turn so well that it became dominant. So it's interesting that Evans actually gave an argument for the Russellian inversion, and that defenders of metaphysical indeterminacy and semantic underdetermination might be seen as pushing back against this inversion.

[*Just to be clear – We're presenting on Meillassoux and Kaplan's Paradox at SPEP this year. We're not cowriting on the indeterminacy stuff. That's his project. I have some vestigial interest in vagueness itself which relates to a side thing I'm doing with modality that isn't worth going into here.

**Null hypothesis: metaphysical indeterminacy just is ontic vagueness and semantic underdetermination is vagueness of intension. But this is probably wrong for two reasons. First, Jessica Wilson type indeterminacy can happen for reasons of overdetermination, for example with respect to the push-pull effect when the same color splotch is different colors depending upon the colors next to it (and the phenomenology is very weird when such examples are viewed side by side). Normal vagueness isn't like this. Second, (Mark) Wilson/Brandom type underdetermination allows objects that are initially neither in the extension nor anti-extension to become paradigm instances of the concept in question. Again, normal vagueness isn't like this.

One would need to look at the classic markers for vagueness (indeterminate cases, comparative gradations, and sorites succeptibility) and very carefully assess the literature on metaphysical indeterminacy and semantic underdetermination and see how it all hangs together. I think Heller is going to get some interesting results here.]