Supervaluationism and Its Logics

Varzi, Achille C.

doi:10.1093/mind/fzm633

Cited by 109 publications

(60 citation statements)

References 38 publications

(11 reference statements)

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“…13 I am indebted to an anonymous referee for inducing me to give an answer to this question. 14 It is worth mentioning Graff Fara (2003), Zardini (2006) and-for a metalinguistic definition- Varzi (2007). a myth to be abandoned.…”

Section: Supervaluationism and Inexpressibilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

God’s silence

Paganini

2010

Philos Stud

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Vagueness manifests itself (among other things) in our inability to find boundaries to the extension of vague predicates. A semantic theory of vagueness plans to justify this inability in terms of the vague semantic rules governing language and thought. According to a supporter of semantic theory, the inability to find such a boundary is not dependent on epistemic limits and an omniscient being like God would be equally unable. Williamson (Vagueness, 1994) argued that cooperative omniscient beings adequately instructed would find a precise boundary in a sorites series and that, for this reason, the semantic theory misses its target, while Hawthorne (Philosophical Studies 122:1-25, 2005) stood with the semantic theorists and argued that the linguistic behaviour of a cooperative omniscient being like God would clearly demonstrate that he does not find a precise boundary in the sorites series. I argue that Hawthorne's definition of God's cooperative behaviour cannot be accepted and that, contrary to what has been assumed by both Williamson and Hawthorne, an omniscient being like God cannot be a cooperative evaluator of a semantic theory of vagueness.The title was suggested to me by Paolo Casalegno who discussed this paper with me on many occasions. I presented this work at different stages of its elaboration during the following events:

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Section: Supervaluationism and Inexpressibilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

God’s silence

Paganini

2010

Philos Stud

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“…8 On the other hand, epistemic modals embed smoothly into consequents of conditionals, and they live happily in the scope of epistemic attitude verbs such as 'know' or 'believe'. It would be nice to have a general principle which generates the contexts in which epistemic modals are highly acceptable.…”

Section: An Alternative Explanationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Epistemic modals and informational consequence

Schulz

2009

Synthese

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Recently, Yalcin (2007) put forward a novel account of epistemic modals. It is based on the observation that sentences of the form 'φ & Might¬φ' do not embed under 'suppose' and 'if'. Yalcin concludes that such sentences must be contradictory and develops a notion of informational consequence which validates this idea. I will show that informational consequence is inadequate as an account of the logic of epistemic modals: it cannot deal with reasoning from uncertain premises. Finally, I offer an alternative way of explaining the relevant linguistic data.

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“…For discussion, seeKeefe (2000a) andVarzi (2007). 3 Similar systems supplemented by a 'definitely' operator, however, lack this property: the deduction theorem, and so some classical deduction rules (conditional proof, reduction, proof by cases), fail.…”

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confidence: 99%

Voting and vagueness

Chase

2015

Synthese

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How to handle vagueness? One way is to introduce the machinery of acceptable sharpenings, and reinterpret truth as truth-in-all-sharpenings (supervaluationism) or truth-in-some-sharpenings (subvaluationism). A major selling point has been the conservativism of the resulting systems with respect to classical theoremhood and inference. Supervaluationism and subvaluationism possess interesting formal symmetries, a fact that has been used to argue for the subvaluationist approach. However, the philosophical motivation behind each is a different matter. Subvaluationism comes with a standard story (due to Stanislaw Jaśkowski) that is difficult to sign up to. In this paper, I make use of a variant of Putnam's well-known idea of linguistic deference, and some results in voting theory, to answer this criticism of subvaluationism. The acceptability intuitions of each member of a linguistic community amount to their voting for one or more acceptable sharpenings, with truth then characterised as truth-in-a-(contextually-determined)-sufficiency-of-sharpenings. This produces a family of logical systems that are close relations of subvaluationism, share its conservatism results, yet have stronger philosophical foundations in the workings of externalist content.

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Supervaluationism and Its Logics

Cited by 109 publications

References 38 publications

God’s silence

God’s silence

Epistemic modals and informational consequence

Voting and vagueness

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