Ambiguity and vagueness in political terminology: On coding and referential imprecision
| DOI | 10.1177/1474885118771256 |
| Author | William Bosworth,Keith Dowding |
| Published date | 01 April 2021 |
| Date | 01 April 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
EJPT
Article
Ambiguity and vagueness
in political terminology:
On coding and
referential imprecision
Keith Dowding
ANU School of Politics and International Relations, Australian
National University, Australia
William Bosworth
Department of Government, London School of Economics, UK
Abstract
Analytic political philosophy tries to make our political language more precise. But in
doing so it risks departing from our natural language and intuitions. This article exam-
ines this tension. We argue that the ambiguity and vagueness of our political language
can be overcome with coding decisions. While vagueness is a deeper philosophical
problem than ambiguity, there are important conceptual similarities. Gareth Evans has
formally proved that there can be conflicting yet equally valid precisifications of vague
terms. We show that this is the case for complex terms in political philosophy, where
each precisification captures part of the sense of the complex term. Vagueness can be
overcome by eliminating the terms in certain contexts of analysis. Versions of the
subscript gambit can be used to resolve both ambiguity and vagueness.
Keywords
Ambiguity, collective will, conceptual analysis, freedom, reference, vagueness
One form of philosophical activity feels like pushing and shoving things to fit into
some fixed perimeter of specified shape. You push and shove the material into the
rigid area getting it into the boundary on one side, and it bulges out on another.
You run around and press in the protruding bulge, producing yet another in another
place. So you push and shove and clip off corners from the things so they’ll fit and you
press in until finally almost everything sits unstably more or less in there; what doesn’t
European Journal of Political Theory
2021, Vol. 20(2) 335–354
!The Author(s) 2018
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/1474885118771256
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Corresponding author:
Keith Dowding, ANU School of Politics and International Relations, Australian National University, Kingsley
Place, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory 2601, Australia.
Email: keith.dowding@anu.edu.au
gets heaved far away so that it won’t be noticed ...Quickly, you find an angle from
which it looks like an exact fit and take a snapshot ...Then, back to the darkroom to
touch up the rents, rips and tears in the fabric of the perimeter. All that remains is to
publish the photograph as a representation of exactly how things are, and to note how
nothing fits properly into any other shape. (Nozick, 1974: xiii)
Introduction
Conceptual analysis, whether done for its own sake or as part of a larger argument
about social justice or the organization of society, often seems to resemble Robert
Nozick’s parody. The dominant mode of conceptual analysis in modern analytic
theory is to try to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for the correct appli-
cation of a term. This occurs not only during rather old-fashioned conceptual
analysis along the lines of ‘what is freedom?’, but also as concepts are used to
build up theories of social justice or permissibility or feasibility. Writers provide
a definition and, through examples and inference, suggest that it clarifies the subject
better than rival definitions. Previous conceptualizations are critiqued through
examples designed to promote the author’s preferred conceptualization.
Sometimes logical inconsistencies in previous definitions are uncovered, but more
often compelling intuitive problems emerge through ‘the method of cases’ (Baz,
2016; Mizrahi, 2014) or intuition pumps (Dennett, 2013). Protecting a theory and
the concepts derived therefrom requires complex reasoning and defence. As well as
Nozick’s pushing and pulling, we also see writers dodging and weaving to avoid the
sniper fire and landmines set by their critics.
We might query why we think terms in our moral language can be specified by
necessary and sufficient conditions for their correct application. To be sure, it is
difficult not to attempt to give such conditions when defining a word, but why
should we believe that our natural moral language can be logically closed and our
moral inferences axiomatically or deductively proved? Our moral and political
language might still be developing, might always be developing. If our morality
changes as it develops, then so will its basic terminology. Whether it is designed to
utilize our semantic or our moral intuitions, the method of cases might only show
how our morality and moral language change over time. Indeed, it might help that
morality to shift; the cases might act to achieve conceptual change as much as
conceptual sharpening.
Leaving such conjectures aside, we argue in this article that the unsatisfactory
nature of conceptual analysis in moral and political theory is a fundamental feature
of its subject matter. Outside of any developmental account, moral and political
terms are ambiguous and vague. We can, we shall argue, overcome ambiguity –
though overcoming ambiguity does not always neatly resolve political disputation.
The harder problem is the vagueness of many of our moral and political terms. We
argue that vagueness can sometimes be addressed in the same manner as ambiguity,
by precisification and the subscript gambit. However, we also suggest that attempt-
ing precisification sometimes demonstrates fundamental incoherence. Our moral
336 European Journal of Political Theory 20(2)
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