Episode 58: Stewart Shapiro discusses vagueness, part II

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Elucidations 27 min 1 speaker 8 chapters transcribed 10 hours ago

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What is a borderline case and how does it illustrate vagueness?

Matt Teichman 0:00

Hey, Matt Techman here from Elucidations. Before we get going today, I just thought I'd ask if you're a fan of the show, to maybe go to our iTunes page and leave a rating and a review, and that way more people can discover it. Alright, thanks.

Matt Teichman 0:33

Hello, welcome to Elucidations, a philosophy podcast recorded at the University of Chicago. I'm Matt Teichman, and with me today is Stuart Shapiro, professor of philosophy at the Ohio State University, and he's here to talk with us about vagueness, part two. Stuart Shapiro,

Stewart Shapiro 0:50

welcome. Thank you.

Matt Teichman 0:53

So vagueness is a phenomenon that manifests itself in the language we speak all the time. And it's a phenomenon that uh we associate with these borderline cases. Uh so maybe we could just start by talking about what a borderline case is.

Stewart Shapiro 1:07

Yeah. So people have different views on it, but I just take this to be a more like a stipulative definition than what I take it to be. So an object or a person is a borderline case for a given predicate. if nothing about the meaning of the predicate and nothing about the facts determine whether or not the predicate applies or not. So typical vague predicates uh would be uh words like tall or bald or color terms like red. So if you think of something which is sort of halfway between green and blue, would be a borderline case of green and a borderline case of blue, that nothing in the established meaning of the word green or blue, and nothing about the facts, you know, the wavelength that's emitted by it and so on, determine whether it ought to be in the green or not green.

Stewart Shapiro 1:50

Now of course not everyone agrees with that definition, but uh that's sort of the one that I work with.

Matt Teichman 1:55

So what if we were to say that, you know, there is a fact of the matter. Up to this wavelength some color is blue and then after that wavelength uh

Stewart Shapiro 2:02

And we just don't know where that cutoff point is? I mean there is a standard view on vagueness like that. It's uh really bizarre and it only has a few advocates. It's called epistemicism, where all of our predicates have sharp cutoffs. So on a view like that, there wouldn't be any borderline cases, and at least in the sense that I've used it. So for people like that, a borderline case is a case where we don't know whether the predicate applies or not, because it's too close to the, as you say, the exact cutoff. Uh I find views like that. And I think most of us do find views like that just completely astounding that as to how it is that language could have developed which has those sharp borders in it.

Stewart Shapiro 2:34

But it is a view on the map and it has some rather smart people uh supporting it.

Matt Teichman 2:38

I mean the fact that we use the term blue green suggests we don't really know exactly what to call colors like this.

Stewart Shapiro 2:43

Yeah, or or other words like bald or tall, right? You know, that if you have somebody who's sort of halfway between being tall, say for a basketball player, and then someone who's clearly not tall, and then you got someone who's sort of in the middle and you you always you know you'll find a case in there where you just don't know what to say. Yeah, part of the puzzle for views like that is to figure out how language could have evolved. You know, what is it that accounts for these sharp borders?

Matt Teichman 3:06

So at first blush, you know, when you don't sort of think about this too much, you might think that all of our concepts have sharp borders, but then when you start to think about these color examples, predicates like tall, this phenomenon starts to seem ever more pervasive.

Stewart Shapiro 3:18

Yeah.

Matt Teichman 3:19

Right. Are there any concepts we use that don't give rise to borderline cases?

Stewart Shapiro 3:23

Probably not an ordinary empirical concept which we use to describe the world. Maybe in mathematics you get some, you know, like the concept of being a prime natural number doesn't seem to have any borderline cases.

Matt Teichman 3:32

Yeah, right. We would never say, you know, this number is sort of prime.

Stewart Shapiro 3:35

Yeah, that's right. Well, well that's only sort of part of it is having borderline cases. Sort of what makes for vagueness is where you end up with uh what's sometimes called a principle of tolerance where small differences don't seem to matter as to whether the predicate applies.