Achille C. Varzi

Some have argued that the vagueness exhibited by geographic names and descriptions such as ‘Albuquerque’, ‘the Outback’, or ‘Mount Everest’ is ultimately ontological: these terms are vague because they refer to vague objects, objects with fuzzy boundaries. I take the opposite stand and hold the view that geographic vagueness is exclusively semantic, or conceptual at large. There is no such thing as a vague mountain. Rather, there are many things where we conceive a mountain to be, each with its precise boundary, and when we say ‘Everest’ we are just being vague as to which thing we are referring to. This paper defends this view against some plausible objections.

At the beginning, all there is is world. It’s not all alike: here is mama, there is cold, over there—noise. Soon we begin to distinguish and to recognize: more mama, more cold, more noise! Yet initially these things appear to be all of a type. Each is, in Quine’s words, just a history of sporadic encounter, a mere portion of all there is. Only with time does this fluid totality in which we are immersed begin to take shape: sensations recur; objects stick out; noise changes depending on the things around us. We learn how to act and to predict. We launch into giving names, using verbs, painting adjectives. Such marvelous unfolding is the subject of much inquiry by psychologists and biologists, and eventually by sociologists. But for a philosopher it is first and foremost the source of deep and bemusing bewilderment, if not a dilemma: Are we learning to make out the structure of the world, or are we endowing the world with a structure of our making? Is reality gradually revealing the mechanisms according to which it is organized, or is it we who progressively organize the amorphous and continuous flux of our experience?

The paper outlines a model-theoretic framework for investigating and comparing a variety of mereotopological theories. In the first part we consider different ways of characterizing a mereotopology with respect to (i) the intended interpretation of the connection primitive, and (ii) the composition of the admissible domains of quantification (e.g., whether or not they include boundary elements). The second part extends this study by considering two further dimensions along which different patterns of topological connection can be classified - the strength of the connection and its multiplicity

A rejoinder to G. Hull’s reply to my Mind 2003. Hull argues that Sorensen’s purported proof that ‘vague’ is vague--which I defended against certain familiar objections--fails. He offers three reasons: (i) the vagueness exhibited by Sorensen’s sorites is just the vagueness of ‘small’; (ii) the general assumption underlying the proof, to the effect that predicates which possess borderline cases are vague, is mistaken; (iii) the conclusion of the proof is unacceptable, for it is possible to create Sorensen-type sorites even for predicates that are paradigmatically precise. I argue that each of these points involves fallacious reasoning.

One logic or many? I say—many. Or rather, I say there is one logic for each way of specifying the class of all possible circumstances, or models, i.e., all ways of interpreting a given language. But because there is no unique way of doing this, I say there is no unique logic except in a relative sense. Indeed, given any two competing logical theories T1 and T2 (in the same language) one could always consider their common core, T, and settle on that theory. So, given any language L, one could settle on the minimal logic T0 corresponding to the common core shared by all competitors. That would be a way of resisting relativism, as long as one is willing to redraw the bounds of logic accordingly. However, such a minimal theory T0 may be empty if the syntax of L contains no special ingredients the interpretation of which is independent of the specification of the relevant L-models. And generally—I argue—this is indeed the case.

I focus on three mereological principles: the Extensionality of Parthood (EP), the Uniqueness of Composition (UC), and the Extensionality of Composition (EC). These principles are not equivalent. Nonetheless, they are closely related (and often equated) as they all reflect the basic nominalistic dictum, No difference without a difference maker. And each one of them—individually or collectively—has been challenged on philosophical grounds. In the first part I argue that such challenges do not quite threaten EP insofar as they are either self-defeating or unsupported. In the second part I argue that they hardly undermine the tenability of EC and UC as well.

Standard lore has it that a proper name is a temporally rigid designator. It picks out the same entity at every time at which it picks out an entity at all. If the entity in question is an enduring continuant then we know what this means, though we are also stuck with a host of metaphysical puzzles concerning endurance itself. If the entity in question is a perdurant then the rigidity claim is trivial, though one is left wondering how it is that different speakers ever manage to pick out one and the same entity when a host of suitable, overlapping candidates are available. But what if the entity in question is neither a continuant nor a perdurant? What if the things we talk about in ordinary language are time-bound entities that cannot truly be said to persist through time, or stage sequences whose unity resides exclusively in our minds--like the “waves” at the stadium or the characters of a cartoon? In such cases the rigidity claim can’t be right and a counterpart-theoretic semantics seems required. Is that bad? I say it isn’t. And it had better not be, if that turns out to be the best metaphysical option we have.

Like the journal TOPOl, the TOPOl Library is based on the assumption that philosophy is a lively, provocative, delightful activity, which constantly challenges our inherited habits, painstakingly elaborates on how things could be different, in other stories, in counterfactual situations, in alternative possible worlds. Whatever its ideology, whether with the intent of uncovering a truer structure of reality or of shooting our anxiety, of exposing myths or of following them through, the outcome of philosophical activity is always the destabilizing, unsettling generation of doubts, of objections, of criticisms. It follows that this activity is intrinsically a dialogue, that philosophy is first and foremost philosophical discussion, that it requires bringing out conflicting points of view, paying careful, sympathetic attention to their structure, and using this dialectic to articulate one's approach, to make it richer, more thoughtful, more open to variation and play. And it follows that the spirit which one brings to this activity must be one of tolerance, of always suspecting one's own blindness and consequently looking with unbiased eye in every comer, without fearing to pass a (fallible) judgment on what is there but also without failing to show interest and respect.

This volume aims to offer an up-to-date indication of the on-going debate on the nature of logic. The focus is on questions pertaining to the existence and individuation of clear boundaries delineating the concerns of logic: What is their distinctive character? What makes logic a subject of its own, separate from (and generally in the background of) the concerns of other disciplines? What is it for an expression to be a logical constant? Or, perhaps equivalently, what is it for an operation or a relation to be logical? Can these questions be addressed in a general setting, or are they intrinsically unanswerable except within specific frameworks of reference (e.g., a language, or a conceptual scheme)? How are they to be addressed—are they semantic, syntactic, pragmatic? And how do semantics, syntax, or pragmatics contribute to our understanding of these questions? Are the answers fully captured by extant systems of logic? Contributors: E. Bencivenga, J. van Benthem, D. van Dalen, M. García-Carpintero and M. Pérez Otero, A. P. Hazen, A. Koslow, G. Priest, G. Sher.

We tend to talk about (refer to, quantify over) parts in the same way in which we talk about whole objects. Yet a part is not something to be included in an inventory of the world over and above the whole to which it belongs, and a whole is not something to be included in the inventory over and above its constituent parts. This paper is an attempt to clarify a way of dealing with this tension which may be labeled the Minimalist View: An element in the field of a part-whole relation is to be included in an inventory of the world if and only if it does not overlap any distinct element that is itself included in the inventory.

Analyses, in the simplest form assertions that aim to capture an intimate link between two concepts, are viewed since Russell's theory of definite descriptions as analyzing descriptions. Analysis therefore has to obey the laws governing definitions including some form of a Substitutivity Principle (SP). Once (SP) is accepted the road to the paradox of analysis is open. Popular reactions to the paradox involve the fundamental assumption (SV) that sentences differing only in containing an analysandum resp. an analysans express the same proposition, because analysandum and analysans are the same entity. Following suggestions of Gupta and Belnap it is argued that (SV) should be rejected.

The so-called "argument from vagueness", the clearest formulation of which is to be found in Ted Sider’s book Four-dimensionalism, is arguably the most powerful and innovative argument recently offered in support of the view that objects are four-dimensional perdurants. The argument is defective--I submit--and in a number of ways that is worth looking into. But each "defect" corresponds to a model of change that is independently problematic and that can hardly be built into the common-sense picture of the world. So once all the gaps of the argument are filled in, the three-dimensionalist is left with the burden of a response that cannot rely on a passive plea for common sense. The argument is not a threat to common sense as such; it is a threat to the three-dimensionalist faithfulness to common sense.

I articulate and the defend the following two claims: (i) it is a mistake to think that the structure of the world should mirror the structure of the theories by which we represent it, and through which we try to decipher it, simply because those theories appear to work; (ii) among the most deplorable consequences of this mistake is the widespread tendency to think that there must be a plurality of realities, or several different and irreducible levels of a stratified reality, merely because our credo includes a plurality of theories each of which appears to be as important and trustworthy as it is irreducible to (if not overtly in conflict with) the others.

Convexity predicates and the convex hull operator continue to play an important role in theories of spatial representation and reasoning, yet their first-order axiomatization is still a matter of controversy. In this paper, we present a new approach to adding convexity to mereotopological theory with boundary elements by specifying first-order axioms for a binary segment operator s. We show that our axioms yields a convex hull operator h that supports, not only the basic properties of convex regions, but also complex properties concerning region alignment. We also argue that h is stronger than convex hull operators from existing axiomatizations and show how to derive the latter from our axioms for s.

There are more things between heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy, says Hamlet. Right. But there are also philosophies that have dreamt of things that are neither here nor there, as Goodman says. There is a danger of suffering from ontological myopia just as there is a danger of suffering from ontological allucination. This paper is about some basic strategies that are available to (or have been elaborated by) philosophers to steer clear of both dangers in their efforts to draw up a good inventory of what there is.

The Doctrine of Potential Parts says that proper undetached parts are merely potential entities, entities that do not exist but would exist if they were detached from the rest. They are just aspects of the whole to which they belong, ways in which the whole could be broken down, and talk of such parts is really just talk about the modal properties of the whole. Here I offer a reconstruction of this doctrine and present an argument to illustrate its hidden kinship with another, parallel but independent doctrine Doctrine of Potential Wholes. According to this second doctrine, disconnected wholes (i.e., wholes that are not in one piece) are in turn potential entities, entities that do not exist but would exist if their parts were suitably conjoined.

In ‘Towards a Solution to the Sorites Paradox’, Graham Priest gives us a new account of the sorites based on fuzzy logic. The novelty lies in the suggestion that truth-value assignments should themselves be treated as fuzzy objects, i.e., objects about which we can make fuzzy identity statements. I argue that Priest’s solution does not have the explanatory force that Priest advocates. That is, it does not explain why we find the existence of a cut-off point counter-intuitive. I also argue that this sort of explanation calls for a general theory that goes beyond the special case of linguistic vagueness, for the phenomenon is at bottom not linguistic.

Just as ontology developed over the centuries as part of philosophy, so in recent years ontology has become intertwined with the development of the information sciences. Researchers in various fields have come to realize that a solid foundation for their projects calls for an explicit theorization of the types of entities and relations that make up their respective domains of inquiry, and as the need for integrating such projects arises, so does the need to identify common ontological principles over ad hoc, case-based solutions. This volume collects the papers presented at the third international conference devoted to current research in this area, including invited papers by P. Gärdenfors and A. L. Thomasson.

There are conflicting intuitions concerning the status of a boundary separating two adjacent entities (or two parts of the same entity). The boundary cannot belong to both things, for adjacency excludes overlap; and it cannot belong to neither, for nothing lies between two adjacent things. Yet how can the dilemma be avoided without assigning the boundary to one thing or the other at random? Some philosophers regard this as a reductio of the very notion of a boundary, which should accordingly be treated a mere façon de parler. In this paper I resist this temptation and examine some ways of taking the puzzle at face value within a realist perspective—treating boundaries as ontologically on a par with (albeit parasitic upon) extended parts.