How to Precisify Quantifiers

Arvid Båve
2010 Journal of Philosophical Logic  
Most people would deny that there is something entirely composed of Alpha Centauri and my left thumb. We are more tolerant of composites whose parts are more "connected", a prime example being molecules. And then there are the various "intermediate" candidates, perhaps the mereological sum of a pregnant woman and the foetus, or schools of fish-cases in which we are not sure whether "there are" such putative things. As we move along the succession of mereological sums from the very connected
more » ... rd the very scattered, we are decreasingly prone to agree with the claim that there is a thing composed of the objects in question. Since this will be so even as we have eliminated all vagueness in "composed of" and in terms referring to the putative parts, we have a prima facie reason for claiming that the unrestricted existential quantifier is vague. As part of his case for four-dimensionalism, however, and against the neo-Carnapian metaontology of philosophers like Eli Hirsch (e.g., (2009)), Theodore Sider has argued, following David Lewis (1986: 213), that quantifiers and other logical constants cannot be vague
doi:10.1007/s10992-010-9152-4 fatcat:jo5lmncerbcmlhzglwvohedkxe