Direct Reference and Vague Identity

Abstract

In 1957, reporters asked maverick producer Mike Todd why he had bought a huge twenty-nine-carat engagement ring for Elizabeth Taylor. Todd answered, Thirty carats would have been Todďs quip absurdly implies he knew that thirty carats is the threshold for vulgarity. But most philosophers think stopping here misses the root of the joke. They think there is a more fundamental absurdity; that it is even possible for a single carat to make the difference between a vulgar ring and a nonvulgar ring. We epistemicists defend the possibility. The law of bivalence implies that discriminative terms (ones that apply to some but not all things) have sharp boundaries. Consequently, classical logic permits few degrees of freedom when solving the sorites paradox. One can follow the incoherentists (Wheeler 1967; Unger 1979) and conclude that nothing is vulgar. One can blaze a new path and conclude everything is vulgar. Or one could follow the epistemicists and say that there are some vulgar things, some nonvulgar things, and nothing lies between the Vulgar and the Nonvulgar. Epistemicism goes beyond conservatism about logic. Ordinary vocabulary must also be preserved. We epistemicists think that ordinary words apply to pretty much what ordinary folks assume they apply to. Thus our double conservatism obeys the time-honored dictum Loquendum enim est utplures, sentiendum utpauci (Augustine Niphus Comm. In Aristotelem de