Home

Online Research

Courses I Teach

CV

Name Change

For citation of works published under the name "Delia Graff", I prefer that they be cited in the following way:

• For full-name references, use 'Delia Graff Fara';
• For last-name-only references, use 'Fara';
• For in-text citations, use 'Fara', as in '(Fara 2000)';
• In the bibliography, alphabetize under 'Fara' and include a note saying what name the thing was originally published under, as in:

  Fara, Delia Graff: 2000, "Shifting Sands: An Interest-Relative Theory of Vagueness," Philosophical Topics 28: 45-81. Originally published under the name "Delia Graff".

Papers

To Appear

• Socratizing
  Forthcoming in a special issue of American Philsophical Quarterly devoted to W. V. Quine
  Draft, August 2009: (PDF file)
  

  In this paper I trace Quine's early development of his treatment of names, first as abbreviations for definite descriptions with "Frege-Rusell" style substantive content, then as abbreviations for definite descriptions containing simple predicative content, through to a treatment of names themselves as predicates rather than as abbreviations for this or that type of some other expression. Along the way, I explain why&emdash;despite ubiquitous claims and suggestions tothe contrary&emdash;Quine neve actually uses the verbized name "Socratizes".
  

• Dear Haecceitism
  Forthcoming in Erkenntnis
  The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com.
  Final Draft, November 2008: (PDF file)
  This is a descendant of "Counterparts Within Actuality" but, fortunately, bears slim resembalance to that paper.
  There are a number of changes in the final draft as compared to its predecessor, especially in the conclusion.

  If a counterpart theorist’s understanding of the counterpart relation precludes Haecceitist differences between possible worlds, as David Lewis’s does, how can he admit haecceitist possibilities, as Lewis wants to? Lewis (1983, 1986) devised what he called a ‘cheap substitute for haecceitism,’ which would allow for haecceitist possibilities without his having to give up his understanding of the counterpart relation as purely qualitative. The solution involved lifting an earlier (1968, 1971) ban on there being multiple intra-world counterparts. I argue here that serious problems for his ‘cheap haecceitism’ lurk very close to its surface, and they emerge when we consider the effect of using an actuality operator in our language. Among the most serious problems is the result that truth in the actual world does not suffice for possible truth. The upshot is that if we are to admit Haecceitist possibilities, as we should, then we must reject any purely qualitative relation as the one involved in the analysis of what might have been for an individual.

  
  
• Scope Confusions and Unsatisfiable Disjuncts: Two Problems for Supervaluationism
  Draft (Version 2.0, October 2008): (PDF file)
  Forthcoming in an OUP volume on vagueness called Cuts and Clouds, edited by Richard Dietz and Sebastiano Moruzzi.
  

  Here I elaborate two problems for supervaluationist accounts of vagueness. (I) The best (canonical-)supervaluationist explanation of our inclination to accept sorites premises attributes to us a tendency to confuse the scopes of a Truth operator with the existential quantifier. This explanation is shown to be incorrect as well as incomplete. (II) A well-known complaint against supervaluation semantics is that it allows for a disjunction to be true even though none of its disjuncts is in fact true. Here we develop a new, related complaint: supervaluation semantics allows for a disjunction to be true even though none of its disjuncts could be true.

  
  

Publications

• Profiling Interest Relativity
  Final Version: (PDF File):
  Analysis, October 2008, Vol. 68 No. 4, 326--335.

  Here I rebut a two-part objection to my interest-relative theory of vagueness. The objection, as developed by Jason Stanley, concerns the modal and epistemological profiles of interest-relative propositions. The modal-profile objection: vague propositions could be true even if there were no interests. The epistemic-profile objection: one doesn't have to know or believe anything about agents or their interests in order to know or believe a vague proposition. Stanley's claims about the modal profile of interest-relative propositions are correct, but not worrisome. His claims about the epistemic profile of interest-relative propositions are incorrect.

  
  
• Relative-Sameness Counterpart Theory
  Published Version: (PDF file).
  Review of Symbolic Logic Volume 1, Number 2, August 2008, pp 167-189.
  Permission to print or download must be obtained from copyright owner.
  
  

  Here I propose a coherent way of preserving the identity of material objects with the matter that constitutes them. The presentation is formal, and intended for RSL. An informal presentation: is in preliminary draft!

  Relative-sameness relations—such as being the same person as—are like David Lewis's "counterpart" relations in the following respects: (i) they may hold between objects that aren't identical (I propose), and (ii) there are a multiplicity of them, different ones of which may be variously invoked in different contexts. They differ from counterpart relations, however, in that they are weak equivalence relations (transitive, symmetric and weakly reflexive). The likenesses to counterpart relations make them suitable for an analysis of de-re temporal and modal predications. The difference renders the resulting counterpart theory immune to standard criticisms of Lewis's Counterpart Theory (e.g., in Hazen 1979, and Fara and Williamson 2005).

  
  
• Descriptions with Adverbs of Quantification.
  In Philosophical Issues 16: Philosophy of Language, 2006, 65–87.
  Penultimate version: (PDF File).
  
  
• Gap Principles, Penumbral Consequence, and Infinitely Higher-Order Vagueness.
  In Liars and Heaps: New Essays on the Semantics of Paradox, J.C. Beall (editor), Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004. Published under the name "Delia Graff".
  Penultimate Draft: (PDF file).
  
  
• Desires, Scope and Tense.
  In Philosophical Perspectives 17: Language and Philosophical Linguistics, 2003, 141-163. Published under the name "Delia Graff".
  Penultimate Draft: (PDF file) (GZIPped Postscript file).
  

  According to James McCawley (1981) and Richard Larson and Gabriel Segal (1995), the following sentence is three-ways ambiguous:

  Harry wants to be the mayor of Kenai.

  According to them also, the three-way ambiguity cannot be accommodated on the Russellian view that definite descriptions are quantified noun phrases. In order to capture the three-way ambiguity of the sentence, these authors propose that definite descriptions must be ambiguous: sometimes they are predicate expressions; sometimes they are Russellian quantified noun phrases. After explaining why the McCawley-Larson-Segal solution contains an obvious flaw, I discuss how an effort to correct the flaw brings to light certain puzzles about the individuation of desires, about quantifying in, and about the disambiguation of desire ascriptions.

  
   
• Review of Theories of Vagueness by Rosanna Keefe.
  A slightly shortened version is in Philosophical Quarterly 2003, vol. 53 no. 212, 460-462 (PDF file). Published under the name "Delia Graff".

• Vagueness (International Research Library of Philosophy), co-edited with Timothy Williamson, Ashgate, Aldershot. Published under the name "Delia Graff".

  Introduction written by the editors (Word file)

• An Anti-Epistemicist Consequence of Margin for Error Semantics for Knowledge.
  Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (2002), vol. 64, pp. 127–142. Published under the name "Delia Graff".
  Penultimate Draft: (123K PDF file) (60K Gzipped Postscript file).
  

  Let's say that the proposition that p is transparent just in case K^mp for every m, where K^m abbreviates m iterations of the epistemological operator 'it is known that'. I show that, given Timothy Williamson's margin for error semantics for such epistemological operators, the existence of transparent propositions, (for example B(0), which abbreivates 'any man with 0% scalp coverage is bald') requires (in a large class of models) that certain higher-order predicates (such as K^mB(x) for some sufficiently large m) have known boundaries – a fact which is apparently incompatible with the epistemicist theory of vagueness.
  

   
• Shifting Sands: An Interest-Relative Theory of Vagueness.
  Philosophical Topics (2000), vol. 28(1): 45–81. Copyright © 2000–2001 Philosophical Topics. Published under the name "Delia Graff".
  Permission to print or download must be obtained from copyright owner.
  
  Penultimate Draft: (157KB PDF file) (78KB Gzipped Postscript file).
  

  I propose that the meanings of vague expressions render the truth conditions of utterances of sentences containing them sensitive to our interests. For example, 'expensive' is analyzed as meaning 'costs a lot', which in turn is analyzed as meaning 'costs significantly greater than the norm'. Whether a difference is a significant difference depends on what our interests are. Appeal to the proposal is shown to provide an attractive resolution of the sorites paradox that is compatible with classical logic and semantics.

  
   
• Phenomenal Continua and the Sorites.
  Mind (2001), vol. 110(440) pp. 905–935. Copyright © 2001 Oxford University Press. Published under the name "Delia Graff".
  Permission to print or download must be obtained from copyright owner.
  Official Published Version (access restricted): (PDF file).
  Penultimate Draft: (124K Microsoft Word file).
  

  For helpful comments, I would like to thank audiences at

  • Bled, Slovenia, The Interuniversity Center Conference on Vagueness, (6 June 1998) and
  • Vassar College (4 November 1998)
  
  where earlier versions of this material were presented. These acknowledgements were inadvertently neglected in the published version of this paper.

  I argue that phenomenal indiscriminability, contrary to widespread philosophical (and psychological) opinion, is transitive. For if it were not transitive, we would be precluded from accepting the truisms that:

  1. if two things look the same then the way they look is the same; and that
  2. if two things look the same then if one looks red, so does the other.

  Although these are obvious truisms requiring transitivity, it has seemed obvious to many philosophers (e.g. Goodman, Armstrong and Dummett) that phenomenal indiscriminability is not transitive; and, moreover, that this non-transitivity is straightforwardly revealed to us in experience. I show this thought to be wrong. All inferences from the character of our experience to the non-transitivity of indiscriminability involve either a misunderstanding of continuity, a mistaken interpretation of the idea that we have limited powers of discrimination, or tendentious claims about what our experience is really like; or such inferences are based on inadequately supported premisses, which though individually plausible are jointly implausible.

  
   
• Descriptions as Predicates.
  Philosophical Studies, Volume 102, Issue 1, January 2001, pp. 1–42. Published under the name "Delia Graff".
  Copyright © 2001 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
  Official Published Version: (158KB PDF file).
  Penultimate Draft: (152KB PDF file) (82K Gzipped Postscript file)

  In a number of standard sentential environments, definite and indefinite descriptions lack the properties we would expect them to have if they were quantified noun phrases. In predicative position — as in 'Max is not the owner' — descriptions lack the scopal and distributional properties of quantified noun phrases. In argument position when ocurring with adverbs of quantification — as in 'The owner of a Porsche is usually smug' — descriptions interact with adverbs while quantifers do not, providing for more ambiguities than in a sentence like 'Every owner of a Porsche is usually smug'. Consequently, a Russellian analysis of descriptions should be rejected. To handle the phenomena I propose a unified analysis of definite and indefinite descriptions as predicates, including mass definites, plural definites, and bare plurals. The analysis handles generic as well as existential descriptions, and handles also the interaction of descriptions with adverbs of quantification, without positing ambiguity for either the definite or indefinite articles.

  
   

Drafts

• Generalizing from the Instances
  Draft 1.0, August 2008: (PDF File):
  

  This paper defends the claim, made in "Shifting Sands", that belief in all the instances of a restricted universal explains a belief in the universal itself (when, of course, the instances are known to be all of the instances).

  
  
• Possibility Relative to a Sortal
  Draft 1.3, 18 March 2008: (PDF File):
  

  This paper is an informal presentation of the ideas presented formally in "Relative-Sameness Counterpart Theory".
  

  Relative-sameness relations—such as being the same person as—are like David Lewis's "counterpart" relations in the following respects: (i) they may hold over time or across worlds between objects that aren't cross-time or cross-world identical (I propose), and (ii) there are a multiplicity of them, different ones of which may be variously invoked in different contexts. They differ from counterpart relations, however, in that they are weak equivalence relations (transitive, symmetric and weakly reflexive). The likenesses to counterpart relations make them suitable for an analysis of de-re temporal and modal predications. The difference renders the resulting counterpart theory immune to standard criticisms of Lewis's Counterpart Theory (e.g., in Hazen 1979, and Fara and Williamson 2005). The use of sameness as opposed to similarity relations in the analysis of de-re temporal and modal predication renders the resulting truth conditions as statable in terms that proponents of Kripke's identity-based analysis can accept.

  
  

Handouts

• Adjectives and Contingent Identity
  

  A discussion of the 2003/2006 Mind exchange between Jeffrey King and Kit Fine on material constitution.

  (PDF file). St Andrews Adjectives Workshop. 20 May 2007.
   
• Descriptions with Adverbs of Quantification
  
  • UCSB version (17 Feb 2006) (PDF file)
  • UMass version (7 April 2006) (PDF file)
     
• Comments on John MacFarlane's 'Nonidndexical Contextualism'
  (PDF file). Rutgers (New Brunswick) Rutgers Semantics Workshop. 17 September 2005.
   
• Comments on Chris Kennedy's 'The Landscape of Vagueness'
  (PDF file). U. of M. (Ann Arbor) Philosophy and Linguistics Workshop. 8 November 2002.
   
• Vagueness, Adjectives and Interests (II)
  (PDF file). Northwestern University, Departments of Linguistics and Philosophy, 15 February 2002.
   
• Comments on Marian David's "Truth and Identity"
  (40K PDF file) Presented at "Metaphysical Mayhem V: Upstate Upheaval" on 14 August, 2000.

  A reply to arguments against the identity theory of truth, according to which something's a true proposition just in case it's a fact.

Page created and maintained by Delia G. Fara
http://www.princeton.edu/~graff/olpapers.html
Last modified: "Tuesday, 01 Sep 09, 2:34"