Hans Pedersen and Leo Yan, of the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, presented papers at the Central Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association, held in Denver, Colorado, February 22–25, 2023.
Pedersen's paper, "A Clear and Unambiguous Defense of Vagueness and Ambiguity in Philosophical Writing," was part of a panel on "The Crisis of Styles in Philosophy," organized by the Society for Philosophy in the Contemporary World.
Yan's paper, "Combining Determinate and Indeterminate Values," was presented as part of the poster session.
Abstract, "Combining Determinate and Indeterminate Values"
It is plausible that some values admit of incomparability. That is, some values may allow for certain items to be neither better than, worse than, nor equal to each other. The possibility of such values raises a host of questions for both axiology and rational choice. One question is how values that admit of incomparability can be combined with values that do not admit of incomparability. Such value combinations might occur when a supervalue is composed of two constituent values, one comparable and one incomparable. When combining such values, it is intuitively tempting to hold that those items that are incomparable with respect to one of the values, but worse with respect to the other value should be both dispreferred and irrational to choose with respect to the combined supervalue. I argue though that this is mistaken since it erroneously treats incomparability as though it were equality.