Meetings are held Wednesday, 3-6, in TBA.
The instructor is Richard Heck. Office hours are Monday 11-12 and Wednesday 1-2.
The readings are available to members of the course only via the links below. Please note that some of these files are large, so they may take a while to download.
| 3 September | Introductory Meeting |
| 10 September | Michael Dummett, "Wang's Paradox", Synthese 30 (1975), pp. 301-24; reprinted in Dummett's Truth and Other Enigmas (DJVU); Crispin Wright, "On the Coherence of Vague Predicates", Synthese 30 (1975), pp. 325-65 (DJVU). |
| 17 September | Christopher Peacocke, "Are Vague Predicates Coherent?", Synthese 46 (1981), pp. 121-41 (PDF); Mark Sainsbury, "Degrees of Belief and Degrees of Truth", Philosophical Papers 15 (1986), pp. 97–106 (DJVU). |
| 24 September | Kit Fine, "Vagueness, Truth, and Logic", Synthese 30 (1975), 265-300 (PDF). |
| 1 October | Crispin Wright, "Further Reflections on the Sorities Paradox", Philosophical Topics 15 (1987), pp. 227-90 (DJVU). |
| 8 October | Crispin Wright, "Is Higher-order Vagueness Coherent?", Analysis 52 (1992), pp. 129-39 (PDF); Richard Heck, "A Note on the Logic of Higher-order Vagueness", Analysis 53 (1993), pp. 201-08 (PDF); Delia Graff Fara, "Gap Principles, Penumbral Consequence, and Infinitely Higher-order Vagueness", in J.C. Beall, ed., Liars and Heaps (Oxford, 2003), pp. 195-221 (DJVU). |
| 15 October | Timothy Williamson, "Vagueness and Ignorance", Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, sup. vol. 66 (1992), pp. 145-62 (DJVU); Peter Simons, "Vagueness and Ignorance", Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, sup. vol. 66 (1992), pp. 163-77 (DJVU). |
| 22 October | Class Canceled... |
| 29 October | Crispin Wright, "The Epistemic Conception of Vagueness", Southern Journal of Philosophy 33, supp (1995), pp. 133-59 (DJVU); Timothy Williamson, "Definiteness and Knowability", Southern Journal of Philosophy 33, supp (1995), pp. 171-91 (DJVU). |
| 5 November | Stephen Schiffer, "Vagueness and Partial Belief", Philosophical Issues 10 (2000), pp. 220-57 (PDF); David Barnett, "Vagueness-related Attitudes", Philosophical Issues 10 (2000), pp. 302-20 (PDF); Crispin Wright, "Vagueness-related Partial Belief and the Constitution of Borderline Cases", Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 73 (2006), pp. 225-32 (PDF) |
| 12 November | Crispin Wright, "On Being in a Quandary: Relativism, Vagueness, Logical Revisionism", Mind 110 (2001), pp. 45-98 (PDF); Stephen Schiffer, "Quandary and Intuitionism: Crispin Wright on Vagueness", forthcoming in A. Miller, ed., Essays for Crispin Wright: Logic, Language, and Mathematics (PDF). Optional: Sven Rosenkrantz, "Wright on Vagueness and Agnosticism", Mind 112 (2003), pp. 450-63 (PDF), and Crispin Wright, "Rosenkrantz on Quandary, Vagueness, and Intuitionism", Mind 112 (2003), pp. 465-74 (PDF). |
| 19 November | Crispin Wright, "Vagueness: A Fifth-column Approach", in Beall, ed., Liars and Heaps, pp. 84-105 (DJVU); Richard Heck, "Semantic Conceptions of Vagueness", in Beall, ed., Liars and Heaps, pp. 106-27 (DJVU). |
| 26 November | No Class: Thanksgiving Holiday |
| 3 December | Crispin Wright, "Wang's Paradox", in The Philosophy of Michael Dummett, R. E. Auxier and L. E. Hahn, eds. (Chicago: Open Court, 2007), pp. 416-44 (DJVU), and "On the Characterisation of Borderline Cases", forthcoming in Gary Ostertag, ed., Meaning and Other Things: Essays on Stephen Schiffer (Cambridge MA: MIT Press) (PDF). |
| 10 December (Make-up Class) | Delia Graff Fara, "Shifting Sands: An Interest-relative Theory of Vagueness", Philosophical Topics 28 (2000), pp. 45-81 (PDF), and "Profiling Interest Relativity", Analysis 68 (2008), pp. 326-35 (PDF); Jason Stanley, "Context, Interest Relativity, and the Sorities", Analysis 63 (2003), pp. 269-80 (PDF). |