Читать книгу The Philosophy of Philosophy - Timothy Williamson - Страница 17

How often are philosophical questions implicitly about thought or language when they are not explicitly so? As a case study, I will take a question closely related to the problem of vagueness, because it looks like a paradigm of a philosophical question that is implicitly but not explicitly about thought and language. For vagueness is generally conceived as a feature of our thought and talk about the world, not of the world itself. Admittedly, some philosophers find tempting the idea of mind-independently vague objects, such as Mount Everest, vague in their spatiotemporal boundaries and mereological composition, if not in their identity. That kind of vagueness is not my concern here. I will consider an example of a quite standard type, involving a vague predicate.¹ Yet the reconstrual of the question as implicitly about thought or language turns out to be a mistake. If it is a mistake here, in such favorable conditions, it is a mistake far more widely.