Re presenting vague opinion

Re-presenting scientific representation

It is now part and parcel of the official philosophical wisdom that models are essential to the acquisition and organisation of scientific knowledge. It is also generally accepted that most models represent their target systems in one way or another. But what does it mean for a model to represent its target system? Surprisingly, this issue has hardly been recognised, much less seriously discuss...

VAGUE RINGS AND VAGUE IDEALS

In this paper, various elementary properties of vague rings are obtained. Furthermore, the concepts of vague subring, vague ideal, vague prime ideal and vague maximal ideal are introduced, and the validity of some relevant classical results in these settings are investigated.

Vague Existence Implies Vague Identity

Vague parts and vague identity

We propose that not all such arguments are on a par. The first section of the paper distinguishes dialectically effective from dialectically ineffective arguments against metaphysical vagueness. The second section constructs an argument against metaphysical vagueness – specifically, an argument against objects that are indeterminate in what parts they have – which promises to be dialectically e...

Vague Composition Without Vague Existence

David Lewis (1986) criticizes moderate views of composition on the grounds that a restriction on composition must be vague, and vague composition leads, via a precisificational theory of vagueness, to an absurd vagueness of existence. I show how to resist this argument. Unlike the usual resistance, however, I do not jettison precisificational views of vagueness. Instead, I blur the connection b...