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Vagueness in Action

An Indeterminist Account of Preference and Choice

  • New to Eden
  • Hardback
  • 232 pages
  • Publisher: OUP Oxford
  • 15.6 x 23.4 cm

£84.54

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Due for release on 21 January 2027. Pre-order today.

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This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.

Vagueness in Action argues that our preferences and beliefs can be vague. This vagueness is combined with tolerance-denial, the thesis that 'tolerance principles' (such as that if you remove one hair from a hairy man you always still have a hairy man) are false. Luke Elson terms this combination of views 'Supersharp': our preferences are complete in one sense (we have preferences between any two options) but incomplete in another (it can be vague what we prefer).

This middle-ground allows for an extension and defence of orthodox expected utility-maximising rational choice theory, allowing us to cope with incomplete preferences, unsharp credences, and the notorious Puzzle of the Self-Torturer. It does this without saying that we must either have unrealistically precise preferences or appealing to unorthodox constructions such as intransitive preferences. Supersharp is compatible with standard dispositional accounts of what it is to prefer something. The
overall framework is also applied to Spectrum Arguments that 'better than' is intransitive, allowing for a plausible diagnosis of these arguments in terms of vagueness.

  • Title

    Vagueness in Action

  • Author

    Luke Elson (associate Professor Of Philosophy, Associate Professor Of Philosophy, University Of Reading)

  • Book Format

    Hardback

  • Publisher

    OUP Oxford

  • Published

    January 2027

  • Page Count

    232

  • Dimensions

    15.6 x 23.4 cm

  • ISBN

    9780197917657

  • ISBN-10

    0197917658

  • Eden Code

    7580464