The Logic for Metaphysical Conceptions of Vagueness.

Vagueness is a phenomenon whose manifestation occurs most clearly in linguis- tic contexts. And some scholars believe that the underlying cause of vagueness is to be traced to features of language. Such scholars typically look to formal techniques that are themselves embedded within language, such as supervalu- ation theory and semantic features of contexts of evaluation. However, when a theorist thinks that the ultimate cause of the linguistic vagueness is due to something other than language – for instance, due to a lack of knowledge or due to the world’s being itself vague – then the formal techniques can no longer be restricted to those that look only at within-language phenomena. If, for example a theorist wonders whether the world itself might be vague, it is most natural to think of employing many-valued logics as the appropriate formal representation theory. I investigate whether the ontological presuppositions of metaphysical vagueness can accurately be represented by (finitely) many-valued logics, reaching a mixed bag of results.

Authors

• Francis Jeffry Pelletier

Keywords

• Vagueness
• Many-valued Logic
• Evans-argument