Year: 2019
Type: article
Abstract: 1 The classic reference is Fine (1975).See also Keefe (2000). 2 See MacFarlane (2016) for a recent approach of this kind.We may then say that a given language is inconsistent exactly if competence with all elements of that language involves dispositions to accept things that are inconsistent with each other.Talk of language being inconsistent hardly has a pretheoretically clear meaning.I am using the locution partly stipulatively.The account of competence just sketched does not by itself say anything about the semantic values of the expressions of an inconsistent language.One perhaps natural suggestion would be that when the rules governing an expression are inconsistent, then the expression simply lacks a semantic value (or it has a trivial semantic value: for example, a predicate would be empty).I see two problems with this.First, this seems implausibly radical: it yields that nothing is old, or red, or a mountain, etc. Anyone who embraces this radical idea is apt to want to draw a distinction between assertible and non-assertible sentences of, for example, the form '___ is old', and so mitigate the problem by saying that those of these sentences we would take to be true are at least assertible.However, deciding under what conditions sentences are assertible presents much the same problems as deciding under what conditions they are true, and supposing one can come up with a satisfactory theory of assertibility, why not simply use that also as a theory of truth?Second, a different problem is that the incoherence is holistic.It is not just the rules for one expression that lead to incoherence.The rules governing vague expressions lead to problems only jointly with assumptions about logic.4 If the incoherence is holistic, exactly which expressions should then be taken to be empty?Instead I prefer a view that allows vague expressions to have non-trivial semantic values despite the fact that vagueness is inconsistent in the way indicated.Here is one way of allowing for this.Consider the theory of reference-determination in the spirit of Lewis.5 Following Carnap, Lewis held theoretical terms to be somehow implicitly defined by the theories in which they occur.In the simplest case, the referent of a theoretical term is whatever makes true the sentences of the theory wherein the term occurs.But we certainly want to say that theoretical terms occurring in false theories can refer, so we can't always say exactly that.What Lewis does is to allow that the term refers to what comes closest, and close enough, to making true those sentences of the theory.Closeness is here not just a matter of what, quantitatively, makes true the most sentences.Overall best fit is what is at issue; qualitative considerations enter in as well.And if it turned out that a given theory was inconsistent, the same would apply.Inconsistency is not relevantly different from mere falsity.It is presumably obvious where I am going with this: the relationship between the semantic values of vague expressions and the rules, in the sense gestured at, which govern them is, I suggest, like that between the semantic value of a theoretical term introduced by an inconsistent 4 See e.g.Zardini (2008).5 See e.g.Lewis (1970), (1972), and (1997).
Author: Matti Eklund
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W3013061706