The Not-So-Strange Modal Logic of Indeterminacy

• Author(s) / Creator(s)

  • Pelletier, Francis J.

• P.P. Gibbins closes his article (\"The Strange Modal Logic of Indeterminacy\" Logique et Analyse #100 :443446) with \"But indeterminacy generates a strange modal logic. The semantical business of there being classes of indeterminate worlds accessible to no worlds not even to themselves is strange and not intuitively attractive.\" I wish to suggest that the logic of indeterminacy is not so strange as that While I agree Gibbins' final conclusion \"...that the modal logic of indeterminacy, construed as an extension of maximally determinate classic?' logic, affords a poor model for the deep idea of vagueness de re\" my reasons have rather to do with the idea that vagueness de re — that is, vagueness inhering in an object — is not plausibly construed by any operator on sentences. To say that an object is vague is to say at least that some predicate neither applies nor doesn't apply to it ; and this seems to call for some construal of sentences like Fa in a manner opposed to treating it first as meaningful and then prefixing an indeterminacy operator to it. But this is not the point of the present note. Rather, I content myself with showing that Gibbins' argument about the \"strangeness\" of the semantics of indeterminacy is ill-founded.

• Date created

  1984

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Logic
  • Indeterminacy
  • Modal logic
  • Vagueness
  • Models

• Type of Item

  Article (Published)

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R3610W64F

• License

  © 1984 Pelletier, F.J. This version of this article is open access and can be downloaded and shared. The original author(s) and source must be cited.