Oxford University Press Vagueness in Action: An Indeterminist Account of Preference and Choice

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.