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21594
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Stoics applied bivalence to sorites situations, so everyone is either vicious or wholly virtuous
[Stoic school, by Williamson]
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Full Idea:
The Stoics were prepared to apply bivalence to sorites reasoning, and swallow the consequences. ...For example, they denied that there are degrees of virtue, holding that one is either vicious or perfectly virtuous.
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From:
report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Timothy Williamson - Vagueness 1.2
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A reaction:
Williamson sympathises with this view, but the virtue example suggests to me that it is crazy. One of my objections to traditional religion is the sharp (and wickedly unjust) binary judgement between those who go to heaven and those who go to hell.
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14742
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It can't be indeterminate whether x and y are identical; if x,y is indeterminate, then it isn't x,x
[Salmon,N]
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Full Idea:
Insofar as identity seems vague, it is provably mistaken. If it is vague whether x and y are identical (as in the Ship of Theseus), then x,y is definitely not the same as x,x, since the first pair is indeterminate and the second pair isn't.
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From:
Nathan Salmon (Reference and Essence: seven appendices [2005], App I)
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A reaction:
[compressed; Gareth Evans 1978 made a similar point] This strikes me as begging the question in the Ship case, since we are shoehorning the new ship into either the slot for x or the slot for y, but that was what we couldn’t decide. No rough identity?
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9050
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A third truth-value at borderlines might be 'indeterminate', or a value somewhere between 0 and 1
[Keefe/Smith]
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Full Idea:
One approach to predications in borderline cases is to say that they have a third truth value - 'neutral', 'indeterminate' or 'indefinite', leading to a three-valued logic. Or a degree theory, such as fuzzy logic, with infinite values between 0 and 1.
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From:
R Keefe / P Smith (Intro: Theories of Vagueness [1997], §1)
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A reaction:
This looks more like a strategy for computer programmers than for metaphysicians, as it doesn't seem to solve the difficulty of things to which no one can quite assign any value at all. Sometimes you can't be sure if an entity is vague.
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9062
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If truth-values for vagueness range from 0 to 1, there must be someone who is 'completely tall'
[Keefe/Smith]
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Full Idea:
Many-valued theories still seem to have a sharp boundary between sentences taking truth-value 1 and those taking value less than 1. So there is a last man in our sorites series who counts as 'completely tall'.
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From:
R Keefe / P Smith (Intro: Theories of Vagueness [1997], §4)
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A reaction:
Lovely. Completely nice, totally red, perfectly childlike, an utter mountain, one hundred per cent amused. The enterprise seems to have the same implausibility found in Bayesian approaches to assessing evidence.
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