more from this thinker | more from this text
Full Idea
The Stoics were prepared to apply bivalence to sorites reasoning, and swallow the consequences. ...For example, they denied that there are degrees of virtue, holding that one is either vicious or perfectly virtuous.
Gist of Idea
Stoics applied bivalence to sorites situations, so everyone is either vicious or wholly virtuous
Source
report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Timothy Williamson - Vagueness 1.2
Book Ref
Williamson,Timothy: 'Vagueness' [Routledge 1996], p.13
A Reaction
Williamson sympathises with this view, but the virtue example suggests to me that it is crazy. One of my objections to traditional religion is the sharp (and wickedly unjust) binary judgement between those who go to heaven and those who go to hell.
| 21594 | Stoics applied bivalence to sorites situations, so everyone is either vicious or wholly virtuous [Stoic school, by Williamson] |
| 14742 | It can't be indeterminate whether x and y are identical; if x,y is indeterminate, then it isn't x,x [Salmon,N] |
| 9050 | A third truth-value at borderlines might be 'indeterminate', or a value somewhere between 0 and 1 [Keefe/Smith] |
| 9061 | People can't be placed in a precise order according to how 'nice' they are [Keefe/Smith] |
| 9062 | If truth-values for vagueness range from 0 to 1, there must be someone who is 'completely tall' [Keefe/Smith] |
| 9063 | How do we decide if my coat is red to degree 0.322 or 0.321? [Keefe/Smith] |
| 8946 | We could make our intuitions about heaps precise with a million-valued logic [Fisher] |