Vagueness, contextualism, and ellipsis

Paul Elbourne

doi:10.3765/sp.12.22

Abstract

Stanley (2003) has argued that contextualist theories of vagueness are inconsistent with a certain fact about the interpretation of indexicals in Verb Phrase ellipsis, namely that the semantic content of an indexical in an elided verb phrase must be the same as the semantic content of the corresponding indexical in the antecedent verb phrase. In this paper, some counterexamples are adduced to undermine confidence in this generalization and hence Stanley’s argument as a whole.

Highlights

Stanley (2003) put forward a criticism of contextualism about vagueness that is still influential.1 This being the case, and in spite of the fact that Stanley’s argument has already received a certain amount of critical attention (Ellis 2004, Raffman 2005, Gert 2008), this article launches a new criticism against it
Indexicalist contextualist accounts claim that this context-sensitivity consists in the semantic content of vague terms being different on different occasions (Soames 2002: 445); this seems to be the kind of context-sensitivity that Stanley (2003: 270–1) has in mind
1 For example, it is the only criticism of this kind of contextualism described in detail in the survey article on the sorites by Sainsbury & Williamson (2017)

Summary

Introduction

Stanley (2003) put forward a criticism of contextualism about vagueness that is still influential. This being the case, and in spite of the fact that Stanley’s argument has already received a certain amount of critical attention (Ellis 2004, Raffman 2005, Gert 2008), this article launches a new criticism against it. Says Stanley, wishes to say that the reason each conditional in this utterance would be compelling in context is that, whenever we consider an adjacent pair of agglomerations of grains, we tacitly adjust the content of heap so that its extension includes both. This tactic cannot work with this example, he claims, since each occurrence of heap after the first occurs in an elided verb phrase; by III, this means that each occurrence of this word has the same content (the content provided by the first, overt, occurrence), contrary to what is required by the indexicalist contextualist account of the sorites.

Some counterexamples to III

Other possible counterexamples

Other uses of current

Conclusion