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    Any good recent overviews on theories of vagueness?

    Near the end of summer the LSU philosophy reading group is going to begin reading things on vagueness. We're going to start with Rosanna Keefe's excellent Theories of Vagueness, which gives an excellent overview of the state of the field circa 2000.

    We don't really know where to go from there, since so much has been done in the ensuing 14 years. Are there any more recent books that achieve what Keefe managed, presenting an overview of the state of the field? Barring that, are there a handful of more recent canonical texts that one must cover to get reasonably up to date? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

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    5 responses to “Any good recent overviews on theories of vagueness?”

    1. jdkbrown Avatar
      jdkbrown

      Brian Weatherson’s “<a href="http://brian.weatherson.org/papers.html"notes towards an abandoned vagueness book” are very good, though they’re from 2002. Vagueness: A Guide, edited by Giuseppina Ronzitti looks like it might fit the bill, though I haven’t had a chance to read it yet (Warning: Overpriced Springer volume).
      Off the top of my head, here are a few recent, important things:
      Vagueness in Context, Stewart Shapiro
      (or his précis of it, “Reasoning with Slippery Predicates,” in Studia Logica (2008), pp. 313 ff.)
      “Supervaluations Debugged,” Asher, Dever, and Pappas
      “The Impossibility of Vagueness,” Kit Fine
      “Ontic Vagueness: A Guide for the Perplexed,” Elizabeth Barnes

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    2. Jon Cogburn Avatar
      Jon Cogburn

      A million (or somewhere in that neighborhood) thanks! This is exceedingly helpful.

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    3. jdkbrown Avatar
      jdkbrown

      My sense of where the field has gone since 2000 is roughly this:
      (1) there’s been some back-and-forth between supervaluationists and epistemicists, with the supervaluationists defending themselves against Williamson’s charges of non-classicality, and the epistemicists defending themselves against charges that they’re view is semantically implausible. See especially the series of papers by Williamson, on the one hand, and McGee and McLaughlin, on the other, in Linguistics and Philosophy. The Asher, Dever, and Pappas paper is another off-shoot of this; Achille Varzi’s, “Supervaluationism and its Logics” pursues a related line–both argue that supervaluationists should embrace local, rather than global, validity.
      (2) worries about whether or not higher-order vagueness leads to incoherence. The Fine paper is the latest development of the line that it does; it’s preceded by papers by Delia Graff Fara and (much earlier) Crispin Wright. Very recently Susanne Bobzien has a paper, “Higher-Order Vagueness and Borderline Nestings–A Persistent Confusion,” in Analytic Philosophy on the topic.
      (3) deveolpments/rehabilitations of non-epistemicist/non-supervaluationist theories, such as Shapiro’s contextualist account, Barnes’ metaphysical account, or Nicholas J.J. Smith’s Vagueness and Degrees of Truth (which I forgot to mention above, probably since I haven’t read it yet).

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    4. Maureen Eckert Avatar
      Maureen Eckert

      Zach Weber has an interesting view: A Paraconsistent Model of Vagueness. Mind, 2010, 119 (476): 1025-1045.

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    5. i k Avatar
      i k

      are we looking forward to a vague description of vagueness
      I dont buy much of the current frisky stuff
      that would be the best
      but again vagueness belongs to the realm of precice concise less precice etc
      its a measurable that cannot be substantiated

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