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Vagueness and the Desiderata for Definition

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Definitions and Definability: Philosophical Perspectives

Part of the book series: Synthese Library ((SYLI,volume 216))

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to show how vagueness is relevant to definition and thereby to thought experiments, the methodology of analysis, and substantive philosophical positions. I hope to achieve this goal en passant in the course of arguing for the main thesis: definitions must preserve borderline cases to the same extent as clear cases.

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Notes

  1. D. M. Armstrong, ‘Does Knowledge Entail Belief?’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society vol. LXX 1969/70 (London: Methuen & Co., 1970), pp. 21–36; pp. 35-36. Another well-known advocate of postponing hard cases is John Rawls; see, for example, p. 96 of ‘A Kantian Concept of Equality’, Cambridge Review (February 1975). The methodological propriety of focusing on atypical and marginal cases is defended by Grover Maxwell and Herbert Feigl on p. 195 of ‘Why Ordinary Language Needs Reforming’ in The Linguistic Turn, ed. Richard Rorty (University of Chicago Press, 1967), and by Amartya Sen on p. 14 of ‘Rights and Agency’, Philosophy and Public Affairs vol. 11 no. 1 (Winter 1982).

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  2. Actually, this ambiguity spawns a large family of verbal disputes and confusions. I discuss these in ‘The Ambiguity of Vagueness and Precision’, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly vol. 70 no. 2 (June 1989), pp. 174-183.

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  3. Stanislav Andreski, Social Sciences as Sorcery (London: Ebenezer Baylis and Son, 1972), p. 70.

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  4. Duhem makes this widely cited claim in The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory, trans. P. P. Wiener (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1954), pp. 178–179. Richard Robinson defends vague concepts with the alleged relation between vagueness and probability in Definition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950), p. 184.

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  5. I defend the epistemic theory in Blindspots (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).

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  6. Dreyfus’s argument appears in What Computers Can’t Do (New York: Harper, 1972).

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  7. Jerry Fodor, The Language of Thought (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1975), p. 63. Virtually all proponents of truth-conditional semantics subscribe to the doctrine Fodor is applying. For nice endorsements of the method see p. 92 of David Lewis’s Counterfactuals and p. 36 of Mark Platts’ Ways of Meaning.

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  8. Ernest Nagel ‘Some Reflections in the Use of Language in the Natural Sciences’, Journal of Philosophy vol. XLII no. 23 (November 8, 1945), pp. 617–630; pp. 620-621.

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  9. Raziel Abelson, ‘Definition’, Encyclopedia of Philosophy vol. 2, ed. Paul Edwards (New York: MacMillan, 1967), p. 315.

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  10. See his ‘Rejoinder: On a Kantian Conception of Language’ in The Paradox of the Liar, ed. Robert L. Martin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), pp. 59–66.

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  11. Fine’s classic treatment appears in ‘Vagueness, Truth and Logic’, Synthese vol. 30 nos. 3–4 (April–May, 1975), pp. 265–300.

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  12. The quotation appears in Branden Matthews’s Parts of Speech on p. 126.

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  13. The term was introduced by Sidney Axinn and David Axinn in ‘Notes on the Logic of the Ignorance Relations’, American Philosophical Quarterly vol. 13 no. 2 (April 1976), pp. 135–143.

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  14. Lycan applies this principle in ‘Evidence One Does Not Possess’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy vol. 55 (1977), pp. 114–126; p. 119. He also uses it in his books Logical Form in Natural Language and Consciousness.

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  15. Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 213.

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  16. W. V. Quine in a review of Milton Munitz’s anthology Identity and Individuation in the Journal of Philosophy vol. LXIX no. 16 (September 7, 1972), pp. 488–497; pp. 489-490.

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  17. Nelson Goodman, The Structure of Appearance (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1951), p. 6.

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  18. Lawrence C. Becker, ‘Human Being: The Boundaries of the Concept’, in Medicine and Moral Philosophy, ed. Marshall Cohen et al. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), pp. 23–48; p. 47.

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  19. Jonathan Glover, Causing Death and Saving Lives (Middlesex, 1977), p. 45.

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  20. Michael B. Green and Daniel Wilder, ‘Brain Death and Personal Identity’ in Medicine and Moral Philosophy, pp. 49–77; p. 60.

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  21. F. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufman (1974), p. 266.

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  22. Johnston addresses the objection, that he is merely changing the subject in ‘Relativism and the Self’, Relativism: Interpretation and Confronation, ed. Michael Krausz (Notre Dame Press, 1989), pp. 441–472.

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  23. J. Katz and J. A. Fodor, ‘The Structure of Semantic Theory’, Language vol. 39 (1963), pp. 170–210; p. 173.

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  24. C. G. Hempel, ‘Vagueness and Logic’, Philosophy of Science vol. 6 (1939), p. 170. Max Black defended a similar theory in ‘Vagueness: An Exercise in Logical Analysis’, in his Language and Philosophy (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1949).

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  25. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, p. 227.

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  26. Daniel Dennett’s evidence for the inconsistency of pain is given on pp. 221-225 of Brainstorms (Harvester Press, 1978).

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  27. Ibid., p. 225.

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  28. Ibid., p. 228.

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  29. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Blackwell, 1967), sec. 403.

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  30. Ibid., sec. 553.

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  31. W. B. Gallie, ‘Essentially contested concepts’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 56, (1955-56), p. 172. For a recent discussion, see Peter Ingram’s ‘Open Concepts and Contested Concepts’, Philosophia vol. 15 nos. 1–2 (September 1985) pp. 41-59.

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  32. Norman Malcolm in Consciousness and Causality (co-authored with D. M. Armstrong) (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), p. 19.

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  33. Norman Malcolm, p. 21.

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  34. Quine’s acceptance of partisan borderline cases can be gleaned from p. 41 of Word and Object (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1960). For a more recent example, consider Dale Thorpe’s characterization of borderline cases as ones in which opposite classifications are rationally acceptable on p. 391 of ‘The Sorites Paradox’, Synthese 61 (1984), pp. 391-421.

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  35. Keith Lehrer, Knowledge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), pp. 61–62.

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  36. Colin Radford, ‘“Analysing” Know(s) That’, Philosophical Quarterly 20 (1970), pp. 222–229; pp. 228-229.

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  37. Keith Lehrer, Knowledge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), pp. 61–62.

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  38. Unger is the most prolific incoherentist. His most direct discussion is in ‘Why there are no people’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981), pp. 177–222.

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  39. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Remarks (London: Basil Blackwell, 1975), p. 332. Many of the prophesized philosophers appear in the bibliography of Graham Priest’s In Contradiction (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987).

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  40. Kearn says ‘true’ and ‘false’ are incorrigibly vague in’ some Remarks Prompted by van Fraassen’s Paper’, The Paradox of the Liar, pp. 47-58; p. 54.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, New York University, USA

    Roy Sorensen

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  1. Roy Sorensen
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Minnesota, Duluth, USA

    James H. Fetzer

  2. Department of Philosophy, Yeshiva University, New York, USA

    David Shatz

  3. Department of Philosophy, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA

    George N. Schlesinger

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© 1991 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht

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Sorensen, R. (1991). Vagueness and the Desiderata for Definition. In: Fetzer, J.H., Shatz, D., Schlesinger, G.N. (eds) Definitions and Definability: Philosophical Perspectives. Synthese Library, vol 216. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-3346-3_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-3346-3_4

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht

  • Print ISBN: 978-94-010-5478-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-94-011-3346-3

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