Incommensurability and Vagueness

Författare

Wlodek Rabinowicz

Summary, in English

Two items are commensurable in value if and only if one of them is better than the other or if they are equally as good. They are incommensurable if none of these relations obtains. Given incommensurability, not even a purely ordinal measure is available for comparison: We cannot represent the relationship between the items by assigning a number to each that specifies the position of that item in the value ordering.

This paper casts doubts on John Broome’s argument that vagueness in value comparisons crowds out incommensurability. It also shows how vagueness can be injected into a formal model of value relations that has room for different types of incommensurability. The model implements some basic insights of the ‘fitting attitudes’-analysis of value.

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