An Overview of the Current Debate

Having discussed and ruled out the nihilistic and non-classical approaches to the sorites paradox we must follow logic where it leads: sorites sequences have cutoff points.

There was a first nanosecond at which a person becomes old, a single hair that makes the difference between being bald and not bald, and so on and so forth. While this may sound admittedly wild at first, we saw that the alternatives fared little better.

Of course, even though a single nanosecond can make the difference between being old and not old, it's a vague matter which that nanosecond is: people at the cutoff age are borderline old. According to the naive conception of this notion of borderlineness, the properties of being old, being not old, and being borderline old divide people into three mutually exclusive classes. However, a corollary of accepting classical logic is that this naive conception must be abandoned. For given excluded middle, even borderline old people are either old or not old; thus there are either borderline old people who are old, orborderline old people who are not old (presumably both). Some classical logicians play down this consequence, insisting that even though there are old people who are borderline old (or non-old people who are borderline old), there is still something incoherent about the assumption that a person is old and borderline old.^{^[18]}Nonetheless, the fact that borderline oldness does not preclude oldness is a surprising consequence of classical logic that I think one ought to be upfront about.

However, while classical logic alone settles many of the questions of interest— the existence of cutoff points being a prime example—there are many questions it leaves open. Providing answers to these further questions fleshes out one's theory of vagueness.

The purpose of this chapter and the next is to sort through some of these questions and to delineate the important points of dispute in the philosophy of vagueness for a more detailed treatment in later chapters. In chapter 3, I'll give a swift overview of the main theses of this book, and try to situate them within the context of more traditional debates in the philosophy of vagueness.

class=a7 style='text-indent:18.0pt'>That said, a few words of warning are in order. It is my view that many of the questions that have traditionally occupied philosophers of vagueness do not really carve up the space of possible views at its philosophical joints. Thus, if we are to get a feel for what the distinctive positions in the philosophy of vagueness are, and indeed to understand where the position favoured in this book falls, it will be important to spend some time clarifying these issues. This might require unlearning many of the things we think we know about the space of views consistent with classical logic. For instance, the two most well-known classical theories of vagueness, at least as they are usually represented, will not carve out distinctive positions, if my characterization of the philosophical landscape is correct.^{^[19]}^{^[20]}

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Source: Bacon Andrew. Vagueness and Thought. Oxford University Press,2018. — 361 p. — (Oxford Philosophical Monographs). 2018

An Overview of the Current Debate

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