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Referential Indeterminacy with an Ontic Source? – A Criticism of Williams’s Defense of Vague Objects

  • Ken Akiba EMAIL logo
From the journal Metaphysica

Abstract

J. Robert G. Williams argues that referential indeterminacy may arise as a result of ontic indeterminacy, and that lambda-abstraction is not applicable to indeterminate identity statements, i.e., statements of the form, ‘it is indeterminate whether a is identical with b,’ if they involve such ontically induced referential indeterminacy; so Evans’s reductio argument against vague objects does not work. This paper finds fault with Williams’s defense of vague objects and shows that there is much reason to doubt that the idea of ontically induced referential indeterminacy plays any significant role in a proper defense of vague objects against Evans’s argument.

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Published Online: 2015-5-14
Published in Print: 2015-9-18

©2015 by De Gruyter

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