> On Apr 8, 2016, at 3:04 PM, Jerry Rhee <[email protected]> wrote: > > What exactly is "complete" about a logic of vagueness?
Isn’t Peirce’s distinction between generals and vagues complete? It doesn’t deal with all philosophical questions with the term “vague” which often include what I’d call ambiguity or formal indeterminacy. But for what Peirce calls vague it seems complete. To be vague is to have some property that is determined but not by the speaker. So the question “what was the horse you were thinking of yesterday?” is vague in that we don’t know what horse this is (the property) yet determined in that there is such a horse in a determinate way. Where this catches people thinking it’s incomplete seems to be things like the Sorites problem that Williamson and others have written about so interestingly the last decade or so. I take Williamson to be adopting a more Peircean approach of vagueness in that the question of how many hairs it takes for someone to be bald is determinate but unkonwn. This is opposed to the view (which I favor) that linguistically it’s just unstable and thus ambiguous. As an aside it’s always fun talking Williamson with people. I meet people who think his arguments are lousy but his positions right and people who think his positions wrong but that he offers very interesting arguments. I’d add that the logic of vagueness for Peirce to me is also caught up in his semiotics. That is we can discuss vagueness in propositions but also vagueness is very much tied to his conception of the progress of inquiry. The “gap” between the object and interpretant in his mature period, especially in the letters to Lady Welby, to my eyes seems very much tied to vagueness. Indeed the universe as an argument is due to the universe coming to know itself by reducing vagueness. Effectively Hegel but reconceived somewhat.
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