I don't see how the spectrum-analysis is very radical. If we want to say true things using vague terms, one way to do it would certainly be comparative "X is taller than Y".
It is much harder to see how there could be clear truth-conditions for sentences using vague terms non-comparatively.
It is not clear that there is some underlying matter of fact as to whether a sentence using the word "socialism" is true or false. At least it is not clear why we should think that - the word was invented by people and so why should we think that there is some fact of the matter of its truth value beyond the judgements of the people using it. And so if the people who use it aren't sure about its truth conditions, then I don't see why we should think that there are truth conditions about the usage of the word.
You might, as you suggest, say that there are certain intervals where it is at least clear that there are truth conditions, even if there are vague cases. But that would surely just lead to an infinite regress of vague boundaries. It isn't clear when the usage of the term "Bald" begins to become vague, and so it is vague which cases are vague. Likewise it is vague for which cases are vague cases of vague cases. And so on.
It seems much more parsimonious to just give up trying to formalize the everyday usage of vague terms. Instead I think we should just say that they express the vague intentions of agents, but not propositions with necessary a d sufficient truth-conditions.
But we can easily still salvage our intuition that these words do express propositions by realizing that they are extremely useful in everyday life. Almost all our concepts are hopelessly vague, but we would never get anywhere in life if we had to give necessary and sufficient conditions which everyone ageed on for all of our concepts, and so it makes sense that we live our life using vague concepts which don't really ever say anything clearly true or false, but which get close enough for all intents and purposes.
Supervaluationism doesn't entail vague boundaries, just that the precise boundaries are unknown. In that sense it's very similar to epistemicism.
We could abandon compositional semantics, at least for vague predicates, and have some entirely pragmatic account of what these words mean. I don't see why that's any more parsimonious than going for an epistemicist or semanticist approach though (especially the former because you don't have to deny bivalence).
There are cases where I think seemingly vague predicates are actually just unhelpful phrases, such as words where there's no consensus on what the word means and no genuine standards for being a competent user of the word (I've argued before that this is going on with the word 'woke': https://www.pluralityofwords.com/p/no-i-dont-know-what-you-mean-by-woke).
So, with the supervaluationist approach, you will say that "X is bald" is supertrue when it is true under all acceptable precisifications. But that still leaves the question of what an acceptable precisification is. This seems like a vague question. That is just what I am getting at.
Maybe parsimonious was not the most useful term, that is my bad. I guess we could just say "plausibly true". So I think it is just extremely implausible that there in fact is some underlying fact of the matter as to where the boundary between "bald" and "not bald" is, given how we form such concepts. I think it is much more plausible that we just feel that the term applies better in certain cases than in others, and that is the end of the story.
You might of course want to formalize our language and try to salvage some sort of truth-value, but if you agree that there is not actually some underlying fact of the matter as to when the concept applies and when it doesn't, and that we are just engineering our language at this point, I don't see why we shouldn't just stipulatively define what the words mean, such that "X is bald IFF the sum of the length of the hair on X's head is greater than n cm".
Ah, I think I did a bad job explaining precisifications. The standard thought is that what makes a precisification admissible is just that it doesn't conflict with any conceptual constraints set by the vague predicate itself. We know that 'tall' is a gradable predicate where everyone above the minimum threshold counts as tall and everyone below does not, so an inadmissible precisification of 'tall' would be one that counts someone who's 6'0" as tall and someone who's 6'1" as not tall. Likewise a precisification that would apply 'tall' to concepts and not people would be inadmissible. Also an admissible precisification has to make the vague predicate genuinely precise, e.g. it needs to have defined sharp boundaries.
Ok, so most of this is probably due to me misunderstanding the view. But if that is the only condition on a precisification, then surely it is never supertrue that something is tall. An acceptable precisification would be that everything which is 6'0" or more is tall, and everything less is not tall. But it would also be an acceptable precisification that everything which is 1674252891'0" or more is tall, and everything less is not tall. So for any n number of feet we can make a precisification of that is acceptable. And so there is literally no possible thing for which it is supertrue that it is tall.
Or maybe there is an n number of feet which provides the limit for acceptable precisifications. Then vagueness just arises again: Why is the limit n feet and not n-0.001 feet or n+0.001 feet?
Your second answer is makes sense to me. If 'admissible precisification' is itself vague, and there are decent reasons to think it is (alongside terms like 'borderline' and 'borderline case'), then you run into higher-order vagueness and supervaluationism just pretends to solve the problem using a vague meta-language. Several sentences turn out not to be definitively supertrue or superfalse.
I like a lot of this. Three thoughts, mostly in dissent.
1) Surely describing something as a spectrum doesn't mean something is hopelessly vague! "Tall" is (contextually) useful, one might say hope-fully vague, depending on the context, even though height is a paradigmatic example of a spectrum. However we may say terms like "tall" can always be replaced by something more precise.
2) I think most semantic questions are relative to the question you're trying to answer. If what I as a socialist really care about is freedom from the coercive power of capital, then if people can opt out of selling their labor to capitalists, then that's probably more important than the precise dollar-denominated ratio. (Most right-libertarians care about different questions, so it's not irrational for them to concern themselves with different measures.)
3) For an example of (2), contrast paintings with air. One could imagine an economy where 90% of asset value consists of extraordinarily expensive objets d'art that a few high-paid workers trade back and forth between one another. In this economy (as in our own) it is also the case that air is a commons whose use is regulated (as in factory emissions) but to which all individuals possess inalienable usufructory rights (I.e., breathing) as members of the human community. Here I think the air is much more important, even though its monetary value is nil.
1. I'm playing a bit fast and loose by making Bruenig's view look like a concession to the Sorites. I guess I feel like acknowledging the vagueness and then describing it as a spectrum implies such a concession, although there still some ways out (maybe you don't buy into compositional semantics, you don't think classical logic applies to vague expressions etc.). But if you concede the Sorites then it's hard to say how 'tall' can be coherent, since "the tallest person in the world is not tall "and "the shortest person in the world is tall". That being said, we could adopt a revisionary reading of 'tall' where is coherent and precise in context (e.g. I utter "Jim is tall" to a group of friends at a party and in context I mean something like "Jim is taller than most of us").
2. One of the difficulties in defining socialism is that people are socialists for different reasons and have different ideas about what socialism is supposed to achieve. The kind of freedom from capital you're describing sounds like decommodification and you're right in saying my approach doesn't address that. You could do things with social ownership to address that (e.g. by distributing capital income to everyone or using it to fund a generous welfare state), but you could also not. You could imagine a socialist economy where the social owners of capital decide to spend capital income on boat races, for example.
An upshot to this is that socialism is not automatically a great option even if you're motivated by, say, egalitarianism. It's going to depend on how the firms are managed, how the funds are spent, what non-monetary things are held in commons, and a whole bunch of other things. Now, people are into socialism because they have opinions about those other things and think widespread social ownership is a way to achieve them - maybe because you think social ownership will have certain influences on behaviour, or the owners will make more pro-social decisions or the kind of political movement that could build a socialist economy would care about those things.
I don't see how the spectrum-analysis is very radical. If we want to say true things using vague terms, one way to do it would certainly be comparative "X is taller than Y".
It is much harder to see how there could be clear truth-conditions for sentences using vague terms non-comparatively.
It is not clear that there is some underlying matter of fact as to whether a sentence using the word "socialism" is true or false. At least it is not clear why we should think that - the word was invented by people and so why should we think that there is some fact of the matter of its truth value beyond the judgements of the people using it. And so if the people who use it aren't sure about its truth conditions, then I don't see why we should think that there are truth conditions about the usage of the word.
You might, as you suggest, say that there are certain intervals where it is at least clear that there are truth conditions, even if there are vague cases. But that would surely just lead to an infinite regress of vague boundaries. It isn't clear when the usage of the term "Bald" begins to become vague, and so it is vague which cases are vague. Likewise it is vague for which cases are vague cases of vague cases. And so on.
It seems much more parsimonious to just give up trying to formalize the everyday usage of vague terms. Instead I think we should just say that they express the vague intentions of agents, but not propositions with necessary a d sufficient truth-conditions.
But we can easily still salvage our intuition that these words do express propositions by realizing that they are extremely useful in everyday life. Almost all our concepts are hopelessly vague, but we would never get anywhere in life if we had to give necessary and sufficient conditions which everyone ageed on for all of our concepts, and so it makes sense that we live our life using vague concepts which don't really ever say anything clearly true or false, but which get close enough for all intents and purposes.
Supervaluationism doesn't entail vague boundaries, just that the precise boundaries are unknown. In that sense it's very similar to epistemicism.
We could abandon compositional semantics, at least for vague predicates, and have some entirely pragmatic account of what these words mean. I don't see why that's any more parsimonious than going for an epistemicist or semanticist approach though (especially the former because you don't have to deny bivalence).
There are cases where I think seemingly vague predicates are actually just unhelpful phrases, such as words where there's no consensus on what the word means and no genuine standards for being a competent user of the word (I've argued before that this is going on with the word 'woke': https://www.pluralityofwords.com/p/no-i-dont-know-what-you-mean-by-woke).
So, with the supervaluationist approach, you will say that "X is bald" is supertrue when it is true under all acceptable precisifications. But that still leaves the question of what an acceptable precisification is. This seems like a vague question. That is just what I am getting at.
Maybe parsimonious was not the most useful term, that is my bad. I guess we could just say "plausibly true". So I think it is just extremely implausible that there in fact is some underlying fact of the matter as to where the boundary between "bald" and "not bald" is, given how we form such concepts. I think it is much more plausible that we just feel that the term applies better in certain cases than in others, and that is the end of the story.
You might of course want to formalize our language and try to salvage some sort of truth-value, but if you agree that there is not actually some underlying fact of the matter as to when the concept applies and when it doesn't, and that we are just engineering our language at this point, I don't see why we shouldn't just stipulatively define what the words mean, such that "X is bald IFF the sum of the length of the hair on X's head is greater than n cm".
Ah, I think I did a bad job explaining precisifications. The standard thought is that what makes a precisification admissible is just that it doesn't conflict with any conceptual constraints set by the vague predicate itself. We know that 'tall' is a gradable predicate where everyone above the minimum threshold counts as tall and everyone below does not, so an inadmissible precisification of 'tall' would be one that counts someone who's 6'0" as tall and someone who's 6'1" as not tall. Likewise a precisification that would apply 'tall' to concepts and not people would be inadmissible. Also an admissible precisification has to make the vague predicate genuinely precise, e.g. it needs to have defined sharp boundaries.
Ok, so most of this is probably due to me misunderstanding the view. But if that is the only condition on a precisification, then surely it is never supertrue that something is tall. An acceptable precisification would be that everything which is 6'0" or more is tall, and everything less is not tall. But it would also be an acceptable precisification that everything which is 1674252891'0" or more is tall, and everything less is not tall. So for any n number of feet we can make a precisification of that is acceptable. And so there is literally no possible thing for which it is supertrue that it is tall.
Or maybe there is an n number of feet which provides the limit for acceptable precisifications. Then vagueness just arises again: Why is the limit n feet and not n-0.001 feet or n+0.001 feet?
Or maybe I completely misunderstand the view?
Your second answer is makes sense to me. If 'admissible precisification' is itself vague, and there are decent reasons to think it is (alongside terms like 'borderline' and 'borderline case'), then you run into higher-order vagueness and supervaluationism just pretends to solve the problem using a vague meta-language. Several sentences turn out not to be definitively supertrue or superfalse.
I like a lot of this. Three thoughts, mostly in dissent.
1) Surely describing something as a spectrum doesn't mean something is hopelessly vague! "Tall" is (contextually) useful, one might say hope-fully vague, depending on the context, even though height is a paradigmatic example of a spectrum. However we may say terms like "tall" can always be replaced by something more precise.
2) I think most semantic questions are relative to the question you're trying to answer. If what I as a socialist really care about is freedom from the coercive power of capital, then if people can opt out of selling their labor to capitalists, then that's probably more important than the precise dollar-denominated ratio. (Most right-libertarians care about different questions, so it's not irrational for them to concern themselves with different measures.)
3) For an example of (2), contrast paintings with air. One could imagine an economy where 90% of asset value consists of extraordinarily expensive objets d'art that a few high-paid workers trade back and forth between one another. In this economy (as in our own) it is also the case that air is a commons whose use is regulated (as in factory emissions) but to which all individuals possess inalienable usufructory rights (I.e., breathing) as members of the human community. Here I think the air is much more important, even though its monetary value is nil.
Thanks!
1. I'm playing a bit fast and loose by making Bruenig's view look like a concession to the Sorites. I guess I feel like acknowledging the vagueness and then describing it as a spectrum implies such a concession, although there still some ways out (maybe you don't buy into compositional semantics, you don't think classical logic applies to vague expressions etc.). But if you concede the Sorites then it's hard to say how 'tall' can be coherent, since "the tallest person in the world is not tall "and "the shortest person in the world is tall". That being said, we could adopt a revisionary reading of 'tall' where is coherent and precise in context (e.g. I utter "Jim is tall" to a group of friends at a party and in context I mean something like "Jim is taller than most of us").
2. One of the difficulties in defining socialism is that people are socialists for different reasons and have different ideas about what socialism is supposed to achieve. The kind of freedom from capital you're describing sounds like decommodification and you're right in saying my approach doesn't address that. You could do things with social ownership to address that (e.g. by distributing capital income to everyone or using it to fund a generous welfare state), but you could also not. You could imagine a socialist economy where the social owners of capital decide to spend capital income on boat races, for example.
An upshot to this is that socialism is not automatically a great option even if you're motivated by, say, egalitarianism. It's going to depend on how the firms are managed, how the funds are spent, what non-monetary things are held in commons, and a whole bunch of other things. Now, people are into socialism because they have opinions about those other things and think widespread social ownership is a way to achieve them - maybe because you think social ownership will have certain influences on behaviour, or the owners will make more pro-social decisions or the kind of political movement that could build a socialist economy would care about those things.