Vagueness, ambiguity, and pragmatism

One of my favourite things about the Web is the ease at which serendipity occurs. We take it for granted these days but occasionally wonderful things happen that make us rediscover the joy of connection.

I was browsing The Setup, a wonderful site that interviews people about the hardware and software they use. Being particularly interested in those using Linux (as I do these days) I was delighted to come across John MacFarlane's interview.

MacFarlane is a Professor of Philosophy at UC Berkeley. I was delighted to come across a paper entitled Vagueness as Indecision, which is available as a preprint download.

He takes an expressivist position in taking the position that, "vagueness… is literally indecision about where to draw lines".

In my book, The Essential Elements of Digital Literacies I pointed out that productive discourse involves interaction at the overlap of the denotative and connotative aspects of a term or phrase. What MacFarlane is pointing out is something similar, but outside the realm of ambiguity. For something to be ambiguous, it cannot be merely vague — although right on the left-hand boundary of that overlap is where the most vague ambiguous terms and phrases reside.

The crux of MacFarlane's position is that to have a meaningful interaction, two people have to agree where the 'boundaries' are to what they're discussing:

Here is the upshot. While in using a bare demonstrative like 'this,' one must have a definite object in mind, and successful uptake requires recognizing what object that is, there are no analogous requirements for the use of 'large.' The speaker need not have in mind a particular delineation (even a 'fuzzy' one), and the hearer need not associate the speaker's use with a particular delineation. What we get instead are constraints on delineations. (p.11)

In other words, we humans are pretty good at getting by using heuristics. We agree to suspend disbelief (and therefore enter the continuum of ambiguity) to see whether doing so is, to use the words of William James 'good in the way of belief'.