Title: Vague Mereology and Supervaluationism

Abstract: What is the referent of ‘Mt Everest’, ‘Edinburgh’, and even of ‘Meta’ and ‘Mark Zuckerberg’? Like dust, vagueness ‘gets into everything’ (Dummett, 1995, p. 207) but, unlike dust, it is often taken to be only a semantic phenomenon. Standard supervaluationist accounts explain failures of reference fixing by appealing to semantic indecision, whereas friends of vague objects urge that vagueness is, at least in some cases, in the world. While the existence of vague objects might well be (and has been) defended on independent grounds, the first aim of this talk is to show that ontological vagueness might arise out of semantic indecision in compositional matters. The second aim is to discuss a novel possible direction to look at when dealing with onto-mereological vagueness. While retaining a supervaluationist gist, the proposal is to take precisifications to be ontological rather than semantic and investigate what Classical Extensional Mereology (CEM) looks like in a precisificational dimension. 

Please note that the Metaphysics and Logic Seminar is starting one hour later than usual this week.