•  143
    Theories of Vagueness
    Philosophical Review 112 (2): 259-262. 2003.
    The goal of this book is to defend a supervaluationist theory of vagueness. Keefe begins by laying out a series of desiderata for an adequate theory of vagueness generally: among other things, such a theory will need to solve the sorites paradox, provide a plausible analysis of borderline cases, preserve so-called penumbral connections among borderline predications, accommodate the phenomenon of higher-order vagueness, and comport with as many of our ordinary linguistic intuitions as possible. S…Read more
  •  2374
    In this paper we advance a new solution to Quinn’s puzzle of the self-torturer. The solution falls directly out of an application of the principle of instrumental reasoning to what we call “vague projects”, i.e., projects whose completion does not occur at any particular or definite point or moment. The resulting treatment of the puzzle extends our understanding of instrumental rationality to projects and ends that cannot be accommodated by orthodox theories of rational choice.
  •  1
    Similarity spaces
    In Mohan Matthen (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Perception, Oxford University Press Uk. 2015.
  •  211
    Modality, morality and belief are among the most controversial topics in philosophy today, and few philosophers have shaped these debates as deeply as Ruth Barcan Marcus. Inspired by her work, a distinguished group of philosophers explore these issues, refine and sharpen arguments and develop new positions on such topics as possible worlds, moral dilemmas, essentialism, and the explanation of actions by beliefs. This 'state of the art' collection honours one of the most rigorous and iconoclastic…Read more
  •  40
    Thinking about Consciousness
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 71 (1): 171-186. 2005.
  •  40
    Contextualism and the Sorites Paradox
    with Inga Bones
    In Sergi Oms & Elia Zardini (eds.), The Sorites Paradox, Cambridge University Press. pp. 63-77. 2019.
  •  73
    Sorites Paradox
    with Dominic Hyde
    In Peter Adamson (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2012.
  •  14
    This paper explores the implications of some experimental data for views that identify colors with objective physical properties such as reflectance profiles. Those who reject objectivist views often argue from the existence of intersubjective differences in color categorization ; but objectivists have managed to stand their ground by identifying colors with sets or ranges of reflectances individuated by the ways in which they stimulate the visual system. In the interest of moving the debate for…Read more
  •  83
    In Unruly Words, Diana Raffman advances a new theory of vagueness which, unlike previous accounts, is genuinely semantic while preserving bivalence. According to this new approach, called the multiple range theory, vagueness consists essentially in a term's being applicable in multiple arbitrarily different, but equally competent, ways, even when contextual factors are fixed.
  •  67
    Précis of Unruly Words: A Study of Vague Language
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 90 (2): 452-456. 2015.
  •  239
    accounts in general, contrary to what he seems to think. Stanley’s discussion concerns the dynamic or ‘forced march’ version of the sorites, viz. the version framed in terms of the judgments that would be made by a competent speaker who proceeds step by step along a sorites series for a vague predicate ‘F’. According to Stanley, the contextualist treatment of the paradox is based on the idea that the speaker shifts the content of the predicate whenever necessary to make it the case that each suc…Read more
  •  8
    Transvaluationism: Comments on Horgan
    Southern Journal of Philosophy 33 (S1): 127-132. 1995.
  •  109
    Some Thoughts About Thinking About Consciousness
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 71 (1): 163-163. 2007.
    David Papineau’s Thinking About Consciousness tells a skillful, inventive, and plausible story about why, given that the phenomenal character of conscious experience is an unproblematically physical property, we continue to suffer from “intuitions of dualism”. According to Papineau, we are misled by the peculiar structure of the phenomenal concepts we use to introspect upon that phenomenal character. Roughly: unlike physical concepts, phenomenal concepts exemplify the kind of experience they are…Read more
  •  33
    Philosophers of music (and also music theorists) have recognized for a long time that research in the sciences, especially psychology, might have import for their own work. (Langer 1941 and Meyer 1956 are good examples.) However, while scientists had been interested in music as a subject of research (e.g., Helmholtz 1912, Seashore 1938), the discipline known as psychology of music, or more broadly cognitive science of music, came into its own only around 1980 with the publication of several land…Read more
  •  99
    Even zombies can be surprised: A reply to Graham and Horgan
    Philosophical Studies 122 (2): 189-202. 2005.
    In their paper “Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary” , George Graham and Terence Horgan argue, contrary to a widespread view, that the socalled Knowledge Argument may after all pose a problem for certain materialist accounts of perceptual experience. I propose a reply to Graham and Horgan on the materialist’s behalf, making use of a distinction between knowing what it’s like to see something F and knowing how F things look
  •  52
    The Meaning of Music
    Midwest Studies in Philosophy 16 (1): 360-377. 1991.
  •  201
    Vagueness and context-relativity
    Philosophical Studies 81 (2-3). 1996.
    This paper develops the treatment of vague predicates begun in my "Vagueness Without Paradox" (Philosophical Review 103, 1 [1994]). In particular, I show how my account of vague words dissolves an "eternal" version of the sorites paradox, i.e., a version in which the paradox is generated independently of any particular run of judgments of the items in a sorites series. In so doing I refine the notion of an internal contest, introduced in the earlier paper, and draw a distinction within the class…Read more
  •  87
    Relativism, Retraction, and Evidence
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 92 (1): 171-178. 2016.
  •  124
    Indiscriminability and phenomenal continua
    Philosophical Perspectives 26 (1): 309-322. 2012.
  •  105
  •  52
    Toward a cognitive theory of musical ineffability
    Review of Metaphysics 41 (4): 685-706. 1988.
    DESPITE CONSIDERABLE DIFFERENCES OF IDEOLOGY, objective, and style, these theorists join in giving voice to what is perhaps the most deeply rooted conviction in modern aesthetics: that aesthetic experience is, in some essential respect, ineffable. In apprehending a work of art we come to know something we cannot put into words.
  • Marcus, Ruth Barcan
    with G. Schumm
    In Donald Borchert (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Philosophy Supplement, Simon and Schuster Macmillan. pp. 322--323. 1996.
  •  47
    First-person authority and the internal reality of beliefs
    In C. Wright, B. Smith, C. Macdonald & the internal reality of beliefs. First-person authority (eds.), Knowing Our Own Minds, Oxford University Press. 1998.
  • The thesis develops a cognitivist account of the supposed ineffability of musical experience. It is contended that, when the ineffability is viewed as adhering to a certain kind of perceptual knowledge of a musical signal, its nature can be illuminated by the adoption of a recent cognitivist theory of perception in conjunction with a generative grammar for tonal music . On this two-headed view, music perception consists in a rule-governed process of computing a series of increasingly abstract me…Read more
  •  79
    Vagueness and Observationality
    In Giuseppina Ronzitti (ed.), Vagueness: A Guide, Springer Verlag. pp. 107--121. 2011.
    Of the many families of words that are thought to be vague, so-called observational predicates may be both the most fascinating and the most confounding. Roughly, observational predicates are terms that apply to objects on the basis of how those objects appear to us perceptually speaking. ‘Red’, ‘loud’, ‘sweet’, ‘acrid’, and ‘smooth’ are good examples. Delia Graff explains that a “predicate is observational just in case its applicability to an object (given a fixed context of evaluation) depends…Read more
  •  28
    Review: Some Thoughts about "Thinking about Consciousness" (review)
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 71 (1). 2005.
  •  146
    Is twelve-tone music artistically defective?
    Midwest Studies in Philosophy 27 (1). 2003.
    Worries about the artistic integrity (for lack of a better term) of twelve-tone music are not new. Critics, philosophers, musicians, even composers them- selves have assailed the idiom with a fervor usually reserved for individual artists or works. Just why it is supposed to be defective is not entirely clear, however. I want to revisit these questions by way of putting some insights from music history and theory together with some insights from the philosophy and psychology of music. To find out…Read more
  •  118
    Demoting higher-order vagueness
    In Sebastiano Moruzzi & Richard Dietz (eds.), Cuts and Clouds. Vaguenesss, its Nature and its Logic, Oxford University Press. pp. 509--22. 2009.
    Higher-order vagueness is widely thought to be a feature of vague predicates that any adequate theory of vagueness must accommodate. It takes a variety of forms. Perhaps the most familiar is the supposed existence, or at least possibility, of higher-order borderline cases—borderline borderline cases, borderline borderline borderline cases, and so forth. A second form of higherorder vagueness, what I will call ‘prescriptive’ higher-order vagueness, is thought to characterize complex predicates co…Read more