The Canon
A working bibliography in seven movements — vagueness in language and in law, inferentialism, speech acts and pragmatics, the later Wittgenstein, and the older foundations underneath them all.
Philosophy of language · Philosophy of law
Take care of language.
A working notebook on meaning, vagueness, and the giving and asking for reasons — kept under the name Vagueness. Where a word goes blurred, so does the world; and the work is done at the border.
The wager
Meaning is something we do, not something we find.
The thought that organises everything here is borrowed and unoriginal, and I hold it anyway: a word does not carry its meaning the way a coin carries its weight. Meaning is a doing — a move in the game of giving and asking for reasons, a use within a form of life, an act performed with words. Sense is settled downstream, in the practice, not upstream, in some inner core waiting to be read off.
If that is right, then the honest place to test it is exactly where language is supposed to fail us: at the vague edge. One grain is not a heap; adding a grain never makes a heap; so there are no heaps — and yet here is one. A statute forbids “vehicles” in the park, and the skateboard waits at the gate. Vagueness is not a defect to be scrubbed out of an otherwise tidy language. It is the native climate of meaning, the same in the courtroom as in the kitchen, and a theory that cannot live in it is not yet a theory of language.
For a large class of cases of the employment of the word “meaning” — though not for all — this word can be explained in this way: the meaning of a word is its use in the language. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations §43
What follows is a bibliography I keep returning to, notes worked out in the open, and a room of recorded talks left playing. None of it is finished. That is the point of a notebook.
Four rooms
Notes
Short pieces thinking something through — the sorites, the open texture of legal rules, inferential role, the speech act, rule-following. Drafts, kept honest by being shown.
Lecture Hall
A room of recorded lectures and readings on language and mind, drawn from open and public-domain sources, left running for company while reading.
About
Who keeps this notebook, on what wager, and why it stays anonymous. No institution, no curriculum vitae — only an orientation and the questions that come with it.