The work performed during the project attempted to confirm that hypothesis in a series of three papers. The first of these asked whether the two leading interpretations of indeterminism, semantic and metaphysical indeterminism, have themselves distinct and significant practical implications. The answer to this question, it was concluded, is not an unqualified ‘Yes’ or ‘No’, but a more surprising one: that it depends on whether the best interpretation of semantic indeterminism and the best interpretation of metaphysical indeterminism differ in their alethic (i.e. truth-related) commitments. Building on this, the second paper developed a novel account of decision-making under moral indeterminacy, namely, an account on which moral indeterminacy (be it semantic or metaphysical) entails truth-value gaps. Building on both of these papers, a third paper tested the working hypothesis of the project head on, confirming it: epistemicism and indeterminism do deliver distinct verdicts about what one ought to do in the zone of vagueness of certain moral sorites series, and these distinct verdicts have significant implications for practical ethics.
These results were presented both at the Department of Philosophy at Uppsala University (the host institution) and elsewhere (e.g. at the 2nd Nordic Epistemology Network Workshop in Norway), and they will soon be disseminated to journals in philosophy. In addition to these results, the project also yielded results on vagueness and indeterminacy beyond ethics, namely, on the overlooked connection between those two phenomena and the social realm. These results were disseminated in two papers in leading philosophy journals, one in Philosophical Quarterly and another in Thought.
