Epistemicism, Parasites and Vague Names Nov 8

John Burgess has recently argued that Timothy Williamson’s attempts to avoid the objection that his theory of vagueness is based on an untenable metaphysics of content are unsuccessful. Burgess’s arguments are important, and largely correct, but there is a mistake in the discussion of one of the key examples. In this note I provide some alternative examples and use them to repair the mistaken section of the argument. Why is it so implausible that there is a sharp boundary between the rich and the non-rich? Perhaps we find it implausible merely because we (implicitly) believe that if there were such a boundary we would be able to discover where it is. If this is so we should revise our judgements. As Timothy Williamson [1994, 2000] has shown, if there were such a boundary we would not know where it is. Still, this is not the only reason for being sceptical about the existence of such a boundary. In “Vagueness, Epistemicism and Response-Dependence” John Burgess [2001] outlines an impressive objection to the existence of such boundaries, and in particular to epistemicist theories that posit their existence. Burgess’s objection is based not on principles about the epistemology of content, as the bad objection just stated is, but rather on principles about the metaphysics of content. Here are some platitudes about the metaphysics of content that are very widely accepted. (For a more nuanced discussion of, and defence of, these platitudes, see [Sider 2001].) If a word t has content c, this must be the case in virtue of some more primitive fact obtaining. Facts about content, such as this, are not among the fundamental constituents of reality. Roughly, facts about linguistic content must obtain in virtue of facts about use. But there are simply not enough facts about use to determine a precise meaning for paradigmatically vague terms like ‘rich’. Any theory that holds that ‘rich’ does have a precise meaning must meet this objection, by either identifying the relevant facts, or showing why the widely accepted platitudes about the metaphysics of content are not actually true. As Burgess argues, Williamson’s attempts to do this have not been entirely successful. Burgess argues, persuasively, that epistemicists owe us a theory of how terms like ‘rich’ get to have * Thanks to two anonymous referees for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.