Topics Language

Question Suppose a man, Frank, weighs 250 lbs. To some extent, whether or not we count Frank as fat will depend on context. If Frank stands only 5'3" then we might say he's fat; however, if Frank is 7'4" then quite clearly he is not fat. There are, of course, other factors to consider, too (e.g. muscle mass). With that said, it seems to me that we can tweak his height, muscle mass, etc., to the point where it's simply unclear whether Frank should count as fat or not, and neither empirical examination nor rigorous conceptual analysis will clear up the matter. There is ultimately a problem with our very notion of what it is to be fat--and there are many, many other similar cases of vagueness in our language. Does this inherent vagueness imply that there is no fact of the matter about whether Frank is fat? What about the cases where it seems so intuitively clear that Frank is fat (e.g. in possible worlds where he's only 5'3")?

Accepted:
December 30, 2010

Comments

Vagueness has been much discussed in recent years, and pretty much every possible view has been held. Let me just try to clarify a few things, and then I'll suggest some additional reading.

First, I'm not absolutely sure, but the last few sentences seem to express a worry of the following form: If there's "a problem with our very notion of what it is to be fat", and if, therefore, "there is no fact of the matter about whether Frank is fat", then there will be such a problem even in "the cases where it seems so intuitively clear that Frank is fat". This kind of view is usually called "nihilism", and it certainly has been held. One form of it, which derives from Gottlob Frege, holds that predicates that exhibit this sort of vagueness are semantically defective, that is, not properly meaningful. But nihilism is a pretty desperate view, and most philosophers would regard it as a last resort.

A more common view would break the train of thought here and say that we need to distinguish sorts of cases. There are unproblematic cases, such as when Frank is 7'4" and when he is only 5'3", and in those cases "fat" can be truly or falsely applied to Frank. Then there are problematic cases, which are usually called "borderline" cases. In these cases, we might say, there is no fact of the matter about whether Frank is fat; or we might say that it isn't true that he's fat, and it isn't false that he's fat, either. One can spell out the details in various ways, but this kind of view is probably the most popular.

A quite different view is that there are really no problematic cases: In every case, Frank is either fat or he isn't. Proponents of this view would agree that "neither empirical examination nor rigorous conceptual analysis will clear up the matter", but some proponents of this view, the epistemicists, would take that simply to show that we are destined to remain ignorant, in such cases, of whether Frank is fat. Saying we can never know is a very long way from saying there's no fact of the matter! Of course, such a view owes us an explanation of how the boundary between fat and non-fat gets settled, and I myself happen to think there's just not going to be a reasonable answer to that question. But that starts to take us deep into philosophy of language.

If you want to know more about these issues, then what I'd recommend is that you get a copy of Timothy Williamson's book Vagueness and read it. It is excellent.