A defense of indeterminism |
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Authors: | Steven Rieber |
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Institution: | (1) Department of Philosophy, Georgia State University, USA |
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Abstract: | My goal is to defend the indeterminist approach to vagueness, according to which a borderline vague utterance is neither true
nor false. Indeterminism appears to contradict bivalence and the disquotational schema for truth. I agree that indeterminism
compels us to modify each of these principles. Kit Fine has defended indeterminism by claiming that ordinary ambiguous sentences
are neither true nor false when one disambiguation is true and the other is false. But even if Fine is right about sentences,
his point does not seem to generalize to utterances. What the indeterminist needs -- and what ordinary ambiguity does not
provide -- is an ambiguous utterance where what is being said is indeterminate between two different propositions. I will
show that such cases exist. These cases imply that the modifications that indeterminism makes to bivalence and the disquotational
schema are required independently of indeterminism, in fact independently of vagueness. |
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Keywords: | vagueness indeterminism disquotation ambiguity supervaluation |
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