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Vagueness, Concepts, and Properties: a Non-Semantic and Non-Psychological Account of Vagueness| old_uid | 4570 |
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| title | Vagueness, Concepts, and Properties: a Non-Semantic and Non-Psychological Account of Vagueness |
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| start_date | 2008/04/10 |
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| schedule | 10h-12h |
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| online | no |
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| location_info | salle des Résistants |
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| summary | Taking a proposition to be borderline does typically manifest itself in a sui generis kind of mental state, but psychological theories of vagueness are mistaken in thinking that that kind of state is somehow constitutive of a proposition’s being borderline. For one thing, the psychological strategy leaves a puzzle about the nature of that feature of a vague property which makes something a borderline instance of it; for another thing, it’s arguable that it’s merely a contingent fact about us that we respond as we do in taking a proposition to be borderline. A better strategy focuses not on the response of taking a proposition to be borderline but on (1) those features of our cognitive economy which are causally responsible for that response and (2) the role those features play in individuating the properties expressed by mentalese predicates. I suggest that this strategy, when conjoined with a certain view about the metaphysical nature of properties, yields a response-independent, but also non-semantic, account of that feature of a vague property which determines a thing to be a borderline instance it. This sort of account yields the same response to the sorites as my earlier psychological theory. |
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| responsibles | Égré |
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