Our main aim in this project is to explore the issues arising from the phenomenon of vagueness itself, and the view of vagueness as semantic indecision, vis-à-vis recent considerations and arguments in physics, metaphysics, and metametaphysics, respectively: 1. To establish whether the notion of a vague object is intelligible, whether the indeterminacy contemplated by current physics motivates positing vagueness in rebus, and whether this is incompatible with the contention that the nature of vagueness consists in semantic indecision. 2. To assess the soundness of arguments "from vagueness" in three recent metaphysical debates—on composition, on persistence, and on the problem of the many—, to identify which aspects of the assumption concerning vagueness as semantic indecision are exploited, and explore whether the arguments could be strengthened by weakening this assumption, including alternative views on the nature of vagueness.
3. To offer a taxonomy of the different metametaphysical attitudes with respect to apparent disputes in these three debates, and to explore whether particular metametaphysical viewpoints are presupposed by the availability of such arguments "from vagueness" in favor of metaphysical conclusions.
As part of this, we are running a series of workshops on vagueness and metaphysics. For further details, please check the project's website at http://www.ub.edu/vpmmm.
