Against the Vagueness Argument

Against the Vagueness Argument

In this paper I offer a counterexample to the so called vagueness argument against restricted composition. This will be done in the lines of a recent suggestion by Trenton Merricks, namely by challenging the claim that there cannot be a sharp cut-off point in a composition sequence. It will be suggested that causal powers which emerge when composition occurs can serve as an indicator of such sh...

Change, Temporal Parts, and the Argument from Vagueness

The so-called “argument from vagueness”, the clearest formulation of which is to be found in Ted Sider’s book Four-dimensionalism, is among the most powerful and innovative arguments offered in support of the view that objects are four-dimensional perdurants. The argument is defective—I submit—and in a number of ways that is worth looking into. But each “defect”, each gap in the argument, corre...

Cricoid pressure: the argument against

An Argument against Epiphenomenalism

_________________________________________________ I formulate an argument against epiphenomenalism; the argument shows that epiphenomenalism is extremely improbable. Moreover the argument suggests that qualia not only have causal powers, but have their causal powers necessarily. I address possible objections and then conclude by considering some implications the argument has for dualism.

Vagueness in Language: The Case Against Fuzzy Logic Revisited

When I started interacting with logicians, I was surprised to learn that fuzzy logic is still a big and active field of basic research. This surprise stemmed from my experience with fuzzy logic in my own field, linguistic semantics: In semantics, fuzzy logic was explored in the analysis of vagueness in the early seventies by Lakoff [10], but has been regarded as unsuitable for the analysis of l...