Humboldt Mini-Workshop on Vagueness and Modality
A workshop on vagueness and modality sponsored by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
Humboldt University of Berlin, June 25, 2018
Program
14:00-16:00: Andrew Bacon (USC)
Logical Combinatorialism
16:30-18:30: Juhani Yli-Vakkuri (Tartu & Bielefeld)
Semantic Plasticity and Ignorance Due to Vagueness
Joint work with John Hawthorne (USC)
19:00: Drinks and Dinner: TBA
Abstracts
Andrew Bacon
Logical Combinatorialism
In this talk I explore the consequences of introducing a modality that, roughly speaking, stands to propositions as logical truth stands to sentences. The resulting theory is used to explicate the Humean idea that fundamental properties and relations are freely recombinable, and vindicates a variant of the structural idea that propositions can be decomposed into their fundamental constituents.
Juhani Yli-Vakkuri
Semantic Plasticity and Ignorance Due to Vagueness
Joint work with John Hawthorne
According to Timothy Williamson's epistemicism, ignorance due to vagueness is to be explained by semantic plasticity: a vague sentence is one that could have easily expressed something true as well as something false, so any belief formed by accepting either it or its negation is unsafe, and therefore not knowledge. This paper examines Williamson's original version of epistemicism (in his 1994 book Vagueness), as well as a variety of attempted improvements on it, including published ones by Ofra Magidor, John Hawthorne, and Juhani Yli-Vakkuri, and a novel reconstruction of Williamson's 1994 view, and it finds all of them unsatisfactory. It ends with some general considerations in support of the view that, if vagueness is to be understood in terms of the agreed-upon paradigms, then epistemicism is not the correct theory of vagueness, and there is no hope of explaining ignorance due to vagueness in terms of semantic plasticity. These considerations are not taken to support an alternative theory of vagueness, but rather the views that vagueness is not a distinctive source of ignorance, and that the vague/non-vague distinction is much less joint-carving and interesting than previous work on the topic has supposed. Plausibly, like the analytic/synthetic and the a priori/a posteriori distinctions, the distinction between the vague and the non-vague crumbles upon sustained inquiry.
Humboldt University of Berlin, June 25, 2018
Program
14:00-16:00: Andrew Bacon (USC)
Logical Combinatorialism
16:30-18:30: Juhani Yli-Vakkuri (Tartu & Bielefeld)
Semantic Plasticity and Ignorance Due to Vagueness
Joint work with John Hawthorne (USC)
19:00: Drinks and Dinner: TBA
Abstracts
Andrew Bacon
Logical Combinatorialism
In this talk I explore the consequences of introducing a modality that, roughly speaking, stands to propositions as logical truth stands to sentences. The resulting theory is used to explicate the Humean idea that fundamental properties and relations are freely recombinable, and vindicates a variant of the structural idea that propositions can be decomposed into their fundamental constituents.
Juhani Yli-Vakkuri
Semantic Plasticity and Ignorance Due to Vagueness
Joint work with John Hawthorne
According to Timothy Williamson's epistemicism, ignorance due to vagueness is to be explained by semantic plasticity: a vague sentence is one that could have easily expressed something true as well as something false, so any belief formed by accepting either it or its negation is unsafe, and therefore not knowledge. This paper examines Williamson's original version of epistemicism (in his 1994 book Vagueness), as well as a variety of attempted improvements on it, including published ones by Ofra Magidor, John Hawthorne, and Juhani Yli-Vakkuri, and a novel reconstruction of Williamson's 1994 view, and it finds all of them unsatisfactory. It ends with some general considerations in support of the view that, if vagueness is to be understood in terms of the agreed-upon paradigms, then epistemicism is not the correct theory of vagueness, and there is no hope of explaining ignorance due to vagueness in terms of semantic plasticity. These considerations are not taken to support an alternative theory of vagueness, but rather the views that vagueness is not a distinctive source of ignorance, and that the vague/non-vague distinction is much less joint-carving and interesting than previous work on the topic has supposed. Plausibly, like the analytic/synthetic and the a priori/a posteriori distinctions, the distinction between the vague and the non-vague crumbles upon sustained inquiry.
Organizers: Margot Strohminger and Juhani Yli-Vakkuri
This workshop was made possible by the generous financial support of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation via Bielefeld University and the Humboldt University of Berlin
This workshop was made possible by the generous financial support of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation via Bielefeld University and the Humboldt University of Berlin
