Brian Weatherson, Crooked Timber contributor, has a interesting post about a bit of a tiff between Richard Rorty and Scott Soames that started as book critiques and morphed into ad hominen attacks and academic swipes. One of the concepts in dispute is the growing study of vagueness (non-philosophers, click the link at your own peril). While I read this stuff with some interest, I found words taken out of my mouth when I read this comment:

Didn?t Wittgenstein cure people of the desire to discuss this stuff?

Wouldn?t you rather read Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, or Strauss instead?

While I’m sure the comment was done with at least part of the tongue in cheek, there’s still a point to be had there. Rorty, to some extent, proves this point here:

Crispin Wright takes up the topic of vagueness not because he cares deeply about how many grains it takes to make a heap but because doing so helps him formulate a view about the extent to which mastering a language can be treated as a matter of obedience to semantical rules ? rules about how to line words up with things. It is an underlying concern with the question of whether and how language gets in touch with the world that has made vagueness a hot topic. Perceived relevance to such larger questions enables philosophers who specialise in heaps to shrug off the suggestion that they are trivialising a discipline that once had considerable cultural importance (and, in some countries, still does).

This was very much the point of Wittgenstein’s study — how do we use language correctly in philosophical discourse (and Wittgenstein would claim that once we sorted out language, many philosophical problems would simply fall away since we could talk about them correctly). But, Wittgenstein chose not to focus solely on the problem of the heap, and actually tried to make sense of things. The study of vagueness, as Rorty suggests, is re-examining the ground covered by Wittgenstein by examining a different linguistic problem.

All of the above should, however, be taken with a rather large grain of salt, since I’ve not read much beyond some primer material on vagueness.

Posted on 1 March 2005