Join us this Friday for a talk by Brian Weatherson (University of Michigan), who will be speaking about borderline cases:

SPEAKER: Brian Weatherson
TITLE: ‘Defending the Standard View of Borderline Cases’
DATE: Friday April 3
LOCATION: Rosenwald 208
TIME: 12:30 am – 2:20 pm

ABSTRACT:

Many predicates, perhaps most of them, are vague. And most vague terms have, in some intuitive sense, borderline cases. There is a very common view about what it takes for something to be a borderline F: it is not determinately F, and it is not determinately not F. In her recent book, Diana Raffman has suggested a number of arguments against that standard view, and put forward an alternative. My main aim in this paper is to respond to those arguments, and defend the standard view.

This paper is part of a larger project that I’ll gesture at towards the end, and will happily talk about. The idea is to use a familiar kind of algebraic semantics to develop a theory that has the best features of some existing approaches, without their weaknesses. It’s relevant to the present talk because the theory does something Raffman says can’t be done: namely keep the standard view of borderline cases without qualifying classical logic.