About
An orientation, not a curriculum vitae.
This page is not a curriculum vitae. What follows is the only thing worth putting up: where I stand, and on what wager.
The name
Why “Vagueness”, and why anonymous
The name is a thesis worn as a mask. It is also, plainly, a mask — I write under it on purpose, and I would rather the arguments be weighed without a badge attached to them. An argument about the sorites does not get better because of where its author studied, and it does not get worse for having no institution behind it. Take the claims here as you would take a note passed in a seminar: judge the reasoning, not the hand.
So there is no photograph, no affiliation, no list of publications. If something here is wrong, it is wrong on the page, and you are welcome to say so.
The wager
Meaning is a practice before it is a picture
I am a pragmatist about meaning, in a fairly specific sense. I take the primary phenomenon to be use: not the inner accompaniment of a word, nor a fixed truth-condition fixed once and for all, but what speakers do with expressions and what they thereby make themselves answerable for. Three debts run through everything I write.
From Robert Brandom I take inferentialism: to grasp a concept is to know one’s way around the inferences it licenses and forbids — to be a player in the game of giving and asking for reasons, keeping score on commitments and entitlements. From the later Wittgenstein I take the suspicion of theory itself: meaning shows up in language-games and forms of life, and the philosopher’s task is often to describe what we already do rather than to explain it from above. From the speech-act tradition — Austin, Grice, Searle — I take the insistence that saying is a kind of doing, that to utter is to perform, and that what is meant routinely outruns what is said.
These do not sit together without friction. Brandom builds a systematic theory of exactly the sort Wittgenstein warns against; Grice’s tidy machinery of implicature is not obviously at home in a form of life. Holding them in one hand is part of the work, not a settled result.
The bridge
Where language goes vague, law has to decide anyway
My other training is in the philosophy of law, and the two fields meet exactly at my central preoccupation. Vague language is not a curiosity for the seminar; it is the medium in which rules are written and the condition under which they must still be applied. Hart called it the open texture of law: general terms have a settled core and a penumbra of doubt, and in the penumbra the judge does not discover a pre-existing answer so much as make one, answerably, with reasons.
That is where my pragmatism earns its keep. If meaning were a hidden core, the borderline case would be a failure of access. If meaning is a practice of reason-giving, the borderline case is simply where the practice is asked to extend itself — and the question becomes which extension we can justify. The sorites in the seminar and the hard case in the courtroom are, to my eye, the same phenomenon under two lights.
Method
Description first, theory on a short leash
- Begin with cases, not with definitions. The skateboard at the park gate teaches more than a schema.
- Prefer describing what competent speakers and judges actually do to explaining it away.
- Treat tidiness as a warning sign. A theory that has abolished vagueness has usually changed the subject.
- Keep the writing answerable: show the drafts, name the debts, let the reasons be checked.
Contact
Correspondence
I welcome disagreement, corrections, references I have missed, and notes from anyone working the same border between language and law. The address is real and read.