Polish Journal of Philosophy

Volume 7, Issue 2, Fall 2013

Paraconsistent vs. Contextual Solutions to Sorites

In my paper I argue that a successful theory of vagueness should be able to account for faultless (aka permissible) disagreement concerning borderline cases. Firstly, I claim that out of the traditional (semantic, noncontextual) conceptions of vagueness the best equipped to account for faultless disagreement are paraconsistent solutions (such as Hyde’s subvaluationism and Priest’s dialetheism). One worry concerning dialetheism is that it seems to allow not only for faultless disagreements between different speakers, but also for such ‘disagreements’ between the given speaker and himself. Another worry, at least for some people, is that subvaluationism and dialetheism account for faultless disagreements by allowing contradictions. Next, I go on to argue that contextual conceptions, which are free from this latter worry, are equally well able to account for such disagreements. To this aim I offer a new account of the usage of personal taste predicates and suggest that we model the usage of all vague predicates on them. The idea is that in clear cases “a is F” means “a is F simpliciter”, whereas in borderline cases it means “a is F-to-me”. Since the boundary between borderline and nonborderline cases depends on context, my solution weds content-contextualism with truth-contextualism.