Dorothy Edgington

This chapter is an autobiographical piece, confined, largely, to the role of philosophy in Dorothy Edgington’s life. It sketches Edgington’s rather tortuous route into the subject, her time as a student, her subsequent career in London and Oxford, and also some of the visiting positions in other parts of the world that turned out to be significant for her. On some of her favourite topics—conditionals, probability, vagueness, knowability—she writes of how her interest in them arose, how it developed, and of some of the philosophers who have influenced her most, especially Ernest Adams, Jonathan Bennett, and Michael Dummett.

The essay is a critique of the theory of indeterminacy which Schiffer develops in _The Things We Mean_. Vagueness is the principal, but not the only phenomenon to which the theory is applied. This essay also focuses mainly on vagueness, but the application of the theory to conditionals is also discussed. There is criticism of Schiffer’s notion of “vagueness-related partial belief,” the Lukasiewicz-style combinatorial rules he proposes for this notion, and his theory of how it combines with ordinary, uncertain partial belief (both assumed to come in degrees between 0 and 1). It is argued that probabilistic structure provides a better account of the way “vagueness-related partial beliefs” work.

This chapter discusses some themes from Roy Sorensen's book _Vagueness and Contradiction_. While agreeing with Sorensen that the major premise in a Sorites argument must be false, it rejects the consequences that Sorensen draws from this: that vague predicates have sharp boundaries, and that the phenomenon is to be explained in terms of ‘truthmaker gaps’. It is argued that ‘gappy’ theories of a variety of kinds, including McGee and McLaughlin's theory, misrepresent the phenomenon of vagueness. Further, some of the problems Sorensen raises disappear on a degree-theoretic approach to vagueness.

In this thesis, Semantics, Meta-Semantics, and Ontology, I provide a critique of the method of truth in metaphysics. Davidson has suggested that we can determine the metaphysical nature and structure of reality through semantic investigations. By contrast, I argue that it is not semantics, but meta-semantics, which reveals the metaphysically necessary and sufficient truth conditions of our claims. As a consequence I reject the Quinean criterion of ontological commitment. In Part I, chapter 1, I argue that the metaphysically primary truth bearers are not propositions, but rather concrete representations, either beliefs or sentences. I show, in chapter 2, that we can give sense to a truth predicate applying to sentences, given a truth operator and quantification into sentence position. I argue that this strategy does not commit us to the existence of propositions serving as truth bearers. In Part II I argue that although we must assign semantic values to sentences and/or predicates, the meaningfulness of these expressions is not thereby explained. In chapter 3 I articulate Davidson’s problem of predication and his solution, but argue that he was wrong to attribute this solution to Tarski. In chapter 4 I examine the semantics of modal languages; I conclude that although they require semantic values for predicates and/or sentences we should be instrumentalists about these theories. In Part III I consider the relationship between truth and existence. In chapter 5, I defend Pluralism about truth: in some domains of discourse, I claim, semantic reference plays a merely instrumental role in explaining truth. In chapter 6, I show that Hume’s Principle, which is committed by the Quinean criterion to the existence of numbers, can be true even though numbers do not exist. In doing so, I appeal to meta-semantic and diachronic considerations. In the conclusion I compare my views on ontology and commitment to Jody Azzouni’s; and in the appendix I suggest how one might pursue diachronic linguistics.

It is controversial how best to classify conditionals. According to some theorists, the forward‐looking indicatives (those with a ‘will’ in the main clause) belong with the subjunctives (those with a ‘would’ in the main clause), and not with the other indicatives. The easy transition from typical ‘wills’ to ‘woulds’ is indeed a datum to be explained. Still, straightforward statements about the past, present or future, to which a conditional clause is attached—the traditional class of indicative conditionals—do (in my view) constitute a single semantic kind. The theories I discuss do not fare better or worse when restricted to a particular subspecies.

Frank Plumpton Ramsey (1903–30) made seminal contributions to philosophy, mathematics and economics. Whilst he was acknowledged as a genius by his contemporaries, some of his most important ideas were not appreciated until decades later; now better appreciated, they continue to bear an influence upon contemporary philosophy. His historic significance was to usher in a new phase of analytic philosophy, which initially built upon the logical atomist doctrines of Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, raising their ideas to a new level of sophistication, but ultimately he became their successor rather than remain a mere acolyte.

I argue that the suppositional view of conditionals, which is quite popular for indicative conditionals, extends also to subjunctive or counterfactual conditionals. According to this view, conditional judgements should not be construed as factual, categorical judgements, but as judgements about the consequent under the supposition of the antecedent. The strongest evidence for the view comes from focusing on the fact that conditional judgements are often uncertain; and conditional uncertainty, which is a well-understood notion, does not function like uncertainty about matters of fact. I argue that the evidence for this view is as strong for subjunctives as it is for indicatives.