The Ockham Society (Thursday - Week 6, HT26)

Abstract: Pluralist accounts of vagueness hold that vague expressions express many different things: a vague predicate expresses many distinct properties, a vague name refers to many different individuals, and so on. This view, developed by Cian Dorr, offers an attractive explanation of why vagueness arises and promises an elegant solution of the sorites paradox. However, there is a tension in the view regarding its notion of truth. On the one hand, pluralists maintain that it is, strictly speaking, confused to apply ‘true’ and ‘false’ to sentences or utterances; only propositions are genuine truth-bearers. This allows pluralism to sidestep certain objections framed in terms of the truth of sentences or utterances. On the other hand, the pluralist response to the sorites paradox appears to rely centrally on classifying certain sentences or utterances as true and others as false. In this paper, I explore the strategies available to the pluralist for resolving this tension. I conclude by tentatively suggesting a revision of pluralism that promises a more stable treatment of truth while preserving the core motivations of the view.

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