Alnica Visser

Across his writings, Friedrich Waismann articulates his notion of “open texture” by contrasting it with a phenomenon he calls “vagueness”, claiming that while vague terms fluctuate in their actual usage, open terms may be stable, and that while vagueness can be “remedied” through the provision of more precise rules, open texture is ineliminable. He qualifies this contrast by stating that open texture is “something like possibility of vagueness”, i.e. that open terms can always come to fluctuate in their actual usage despite previous periods of stability. Due to his use of the examples “pink” and “heap” there is a strong temptation to read Waismann as claiming that open texture is the possibility of that vagueness that forms the foundation of Sorites paradoxes, i.e. that open texture is the possibility of something like “degree” vagueness. I argue that this temptation is a mistake. As his own examples of open texture make evident, open texture cannot be the possibility of degree vagueness in particular. Indeed, once we pay attention to his many illuminating examples of various semantic indeterminacies, we find instead, I argue, that open texture is the possibility of no form of vagueness as we understand the notion today. Instead, open texture emerges more plausibly as the possibility of polysemy.

In her most recent book, Jennifer Saul suggests that overt code dogwhistles can function as recruitment tools for wild conspiracism and blatant racism insofar as they can be used to co-opt the existing legitimate interests of potential recruits. I show that this claim is true of only a particular subset of overt code dogwhistles: only polysemous codes can recruit. All other overt codes, including homonymous codes and nonsense codes, can do little more than allow existing followers to recognize one another under the radar in public.

In his _Between Logic and the World_, in the course of presenting his theory of generics, Nickel (Between logic and the world, Oxford University Press, 2016) argues for a theory of characteristicness, or “genericity”, which states that a property is characteristic for a kind if and only if its presence among the members of that kind is explicable by some explanatory domain that recognizes the existence of that kind in the course of engaging the explanatory strategies made available by that explanatory domain. I argue that this notion of genericity is too narrow, excluding properties characteristic for kinds that go unrecognized in such explanatory domains. In particular, Nickel’s theory excludes some characteristic properties of anthropic kinds, such as lilies and cedars, members of which have properties that may be similarly exploited in various human practices despite having divergent geneses. I argue for a generalization of Nickel’s view of genericity where explicability of presence is only one sort of genericity, with others, such as practicability, being possible too.