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The Journal of Philosophy

Volume 117, Issue 11/12, November/December 2020

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Displaying: 1-6 of 6 documents


the woodbridge lectures 2020
1. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 117 > Issue: 11/12
John MacFarlane Indeterminacy as Indecision, Lecture I: Vagueness and Communication
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I can say that a building is tall and you can understand me, even if neither of us has any clear idea exactly how tall a building must be in order to count as tall. This mundane fact poses a problem for the view that successful communication consists in the hearer’s recognition of the proposition a speaker intends to assert. The problem cannot be solved by the epistemicist’s usual appeal to anti-individualism, because the extensions of vague words like ‘tall’ are contextually fluid and can be constrained significantly by speakers’ intentions. The problem can be seen as a special case of a more general problem concerning what King has called “felicitous underspecification.” Traditional theories of vagueness offer nothing that can help with this problem. Appeals to diagonalization do not help either. A more radical solution is needed.
2. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 117 > Issue: 11/12
John MacFarlane Indeterminacy as Indecision, Lecture II: Seeing through the Clouds
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One approach to the problem is to keep the orthodox notion of a proposition but innovate in the theory of speech acts. A number of philosophers and linguists have suggested that, in cases of felicitous underspecification, a speaker asserts a “cloud” of propositions rather than just one. This picture raises a number of questions: what norms constrain a “cloudy assertion,” what counts as uptake, and how is the conversational common ground revised if it is accepted? I explore three different ways of answering these questions, due to Braun and Sider, Buchanan, and von Fintel and Gillies. I argue that none of them provide a good general response to the problem posed by felicitous underspecification. However, the problems they face point the way to a more satisfactory account, which innovates in the theory of content rather than the theory of speech acts.
3. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 117 > Issue: 11/12
John MacFarlane Indeterminacy as Indecision, Lecture III: Indeterminacy as Indecision
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This lecture presents my own solution to the problem posed in Lecture I. Instead of a new theory of speech acts, it offers a new theory of the contents expressed by vague assertions, along the lines of the plan expressivism Allan Gibbard has advocated for normative language. On this view, the mental states we express in uttering vague sentences have a dual direction of fit: they jointly constrain the doxastic possibilities we recognize and our practical plans about how to draw boundaries. With this story in hand, I reconsider some of the traditional topics connected with vagueness: bivalence, the sorites paradox, higher-order vagueness, and the nature of vague thought. I conclude by arguing that the expressivist account can explain, as its rivals cannot, what makes vague language useful.
4. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 117 > Issue: 11/12
New Books: Anthologies
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5. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 117 > Issue: 11/12
Call for Submissions: The Isaac Levi Prize
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6. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 117 > Issue: 11/12
Index to Volume CXVII
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