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Full Idea
Many-valued theories still seem to have a sharp boundary between sentences taking truth-value 1 and those taking value less than 1. So there is a last man in our sorites series who counts as 'completely tall'.
Gist of Idea
If truth-values for vagueness range from 0 to 1, there must be someone who is 'completely tall'
Source
R Keefe / P Smith (Intro: Theories of Vagueness [1997], §4)
Book Ref
'Vagueness: a Reader', ed/tr. Keefe,R /Smith,P [MIT 1999], p.46
A Reaction
Lovely. Completely nice, totally red, perfectly childlike, an utter mountain, one hundred per cent amused. The enterprise seems to have the same implausibility found in Bayesian approaches to assessing evidence.
| 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] |