Epistemicism

Epistemicism

'Epistemicism' is a position about vagueness in the philosophy of language or metaphysics, according to which there are facts about the boundaries of a vague predicate which we cannot possibly discover. Given a vague predicate, such as 'is thin' or 'is bald', epistemicists hold that there is actually some sharp cut off, dividing cases where a person is actually thin from those in which they are not. Epistemicism gets its name because it holds that there is no semantic indeterminacy present in vague terms, only epistemic uncertainty.

Epistemicism was typically considered an untenable position, since it requires vague terms to possess extremely specific conditions of application. Since the publication of Timothy Williamson's "Vagueness", which defended the view, it has been taken seriously by many philosophers working in the area.

References

*Williamson, T. 1994. "Vagueness" London: Routledge.

External links


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  • Timothy Williamson — (born Uppsala, Sweden, 6 August 1955) is a distinguished British philosopher whose main research interests are in philosophical logic, philosophy of language, epistemology and metaphysics.He is currently the Wykeham Professor of Logic at the… …   Wikipedia

  • epistemicist — noun One who subscribes to the philosophy of epistemicism …   Wiktionary

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