Terry Horgan
Publications
Philosophy of Language: Vagueness
Action Theory Without Actions, Mind 60 (1981), 406-14. [HTML]
The author shows that it is possible to do action theory without reference to, or quantification over, actions. Using logical devices such as predicate-operators and non-truth-functional sentential connectives, the author transforms the central definitions in Alvin Goldman's A Theory of Human Action into a form which evidently preserves virtually all their conceptual content, and yet eschews ontological commitment to actions. The author expresses Goldman's notion of level-generation by means of a sentential connective, rather than a relational predicate over actions; in English, this connective can be rendered by the italicized words in "Jones flips the switch, and thereby he alerts a burglar." And I express such notions as action, basic action, and intentional action by means of adverbial modifiers, as in "Jones coughs in an acting manner," "Jones coughs in a basic-acting manner," and "Jones coughs intentionally."
Psychologistic Semantics, Robust Vagueness, and the Philosophy of Language, in S. L. Tsohatzidis, ed., Meanings and Prototypes: Studies in Linguistic Categorization (Routledge, 1990), 535-57.
Robust Vagueness and the Forced-March Sorites Paradox, Philosophical Perspectives 8, Logic and Language (1994), 159-88. [JSTOR]
I distinguish two broad approaches to vagueness that I call "robust" and "wimpy". Wimpy construals explain vagueness as robust (i.e., does not manifest arbitrary precision); that standard approaches to vagueness, like supervaluationism or appeals to degrees of truth, wrongly treat vagueness as wimpy; that vagueness harbors an underlying logical incoherence that vagueness in the world is therefore impossible; and that the kind of logical incoherence nascent in vague terms and concepts is benign rather than malignant. I describe some implications for logic, semantics, and metaphysics.
Transvaluationism: A Dionysian Approach to Vagueness, Southern Journal of Philosophy 33 (1995), Spindel Conference Supplement, 97-125. [HTML]
Transvaluationism asserts (1) that vagueness is logically incoherent, but (2) that vagueness is also an essential feature of human language and thought. I situate transvaluationism within a general approach to language/world relations I call contextual semantics, which asserts (1) that truth is semantically-correct assertibility and (2) that often our statements are rendered true (correctly assertible) by virtue of indirect, not direct, language/world correspondences. Although vague predictions are often true under contextually operative semantic standards, they are never true under maximally strict standards involving genuine ontological commitment. There is no vagueness in the world itself, but only in language and thought.
Brute Supervenience, Deep Ignorance, and the Problem of the Many, Philosophical Issues 8 (1997), 229-36.
I argue that the epistemic approach to vagueness faces the following version of the generic difficulty that Peter Unger dubbed the problem of the many: among the numerous equally eligible-looking candidate boundaries for vague terms and concepts, we cannot conceive or imagine any explanatory basis that would single out some unique candidate over against its competitors. This apparently forces the epistemicist to embrace one or the other of two implausible claims: (1) that although the needed explanatory principles exist, humans cannot grasp them, or (2) that supervenience facts linking use- patterns to semantic boundaries are metaphysically sui generis.
The Transvaluationist Conception of Vagueness, The Monist 81 (1998), 316-33. [HTML]
The approach to vagueness I call transvaluationism makes two fundamental claims. First, vagueness is logically incoherent in a certain way: vague discourse is governed by semantic standards that are mutually unsatisfiable. But second, vagueness is viable and legitimate nonetheless. I argue that the logical incoherence of vagueness is a direct consequence of a feature that most everyone thinks is essential to vagueness: boundarylessness. I discuss the metaphysical and semantical consequences of this incoherence. I argue that any approach that makes a serious attempt to accommodate boundarylessness will be a species of transvaluationism, rather than an alternative to it.
Facing Up to the Sorites Paradox. In A. Anamori (ed.), Proceedings of the 20th World Congress of Philosophy. Volume 6: Analytic Philosophy and Logic.
The sorites paradox, I argue,
reveals that vagueness is weakly logical incoherent (i.e., is governed by
mutually unsatisfiable semantic standards), even though vagueness is not
strongly logically incoherent (i.e., is not committed to individual statements
that are logically contradictory). This approach to vagueness, which I call
transvaluationism, has three important consequences: (1) there cannot be
ontological vagueness: (2) truth, for vague discourse, is indirect
correspondence between vague language and nonvague reality, rather than direct
language-world correspondence; and (3) any adequate account of the logic of
vagueness must incorporate weak logical incoherence, at least implicitly.
The Benign Logical Incoherence of Vagueness. For a volume on vagueness edited by T. Horgan and M. Potrc.
