Blog CRC1646

To deepen our understanding of phenomenon of open texture and broaden our theoretical horizons, project B05 hosted a two-day workshop on 18-19 September 2025 bringing together scholars working on open texture or, more broadly, semantic indeterminacy. Broadly, our aim was to collect fresh perspectives on the fundamental nature of open texture, and how it differs from related phenomena such as vagueness.

The workshop opened with a talk by Derek Ball (St. Andrews), who examined the implications of “Temporal externalism and open texture” — the idea that future facts can influence the present meaning of our terms — for the theoretical problem posed by open texture. His talk raised the possibility that open texture may, in fact, be epistemic rather than semantic in nature. These ideas sparked lively discussion in the subsequent Q&A section, and kept people talking well into the conference dinner.

Céline Henne (Amsterdam) took the podium with “Open texture and the function of conceptual analysis”, a talk rooted in the difficulties classical conceptual analysis faces when confronting the apparent semantic gaps of our concepts revealed in open texture cases. She proposed the notion of alien conceptual analysis, which deals with this open-texture porosity by considering the forms of life within which our concepts are embedded.

After a social lunch break, the second half of the Thursday programme drew increased interest from the wider CRC, with multiple members joining us for the afternoon talks, the first of which was Dan Lassiter’s (Edinburgh), titled “Open texture via social-meaning-first-metasemantics”. He argued that meanings can often be taken as pointers into networks of social norms, gaps within which are revealed in open texture cases. On this view, which invited much curious and critical input from the audience, open texture is, in fact, a problem of social coordination.

Following a coffee break, Daniel Gutzmann (Bochum) gave a talk titled “Mechanisms for semantic creativity: what we can learn from diachronic semantics”. He provided a detailed overview of the mechanisms behind diachronic semantic change (how meanings shift over time), the most theoretically intriguing part of which are the contextually salient relations establishing a bridge between source and target meanings. Such considerations will help us understand how open-texture predicates may (or may not!) shift meanings.

Friday’s programme began with a talk by our PI Christian Nimtz, titled “Open Texture. A view from vagueness”. Christian set out with the observation that both open texture and vagueness involve borderline cases, and argued that if we find what distinguishes open texture borderline cases from those rooted in vagueness, we may be able to get clearer on what being open textured may amount to. His suggestion for such a distinguishing feature: Borderline cases in vagueness (and the kindred phenomenon of ordinal gappyness) can be dissolved by variations of values along the predicate’s decisive dimensions of application. This is not true for OT borderline cases; they are stable under inner-dimensional variation, even when we are concerned with multi-dimensional predicates. The stability vanishes only if we consider not variation within dimensions, but of dimensions – which in turn yields a neat hypothesis of what distinguishes the properties of being vague from being open textured.

Justin D’Ambrosio (St. Andrews) followed with “Clouds and Credences: a probabilistic approach to underspecification”. His talk addressed felicitous underspecification, which occurs when speakers are under-specific in what they (literally) say, but communicate successfully regardless, such as when I find myself at an unenjoyable event and utter to my companion, “I’ve had enough”. Justin challenged classical common ground approaches to this issue, suggesting that listeners may operate with probabilistic credences rather than fixed contents in interpreting such utterances.

The workshop concluded with a talk by further project B05 member Mark Bowker, titled “Open texture with minimal propositions”. Mark too suggested an approach to open texture that lays it out as an epistemic phenomenon; as indecision arising from a clash of the sorts of processes we use to check whether a predicate applies (e.g. checking for manhood by beardedness). This might occur, for example, when we encounter a case for which several of the processes associated with the same predicate yield conflicting results, or when processes associated with predicates usually taken to be mutually exclusive each rule positively on the case.

Overall, the workshop was a stimulating and productive event. It offered reinforcement and challenge to the members of B05, sharpening existing lines of thought while revealing promising new approaches to the issue of open texture. The participations of members from the wider CRC led to intriguing interdisciplinary exchange, deepening the ties between our project-specific interests and the CRC’s broader research programme.

Conference participants  © Sascha Hermannski, SFB 1646

© SFB 1646

Projekt B05 © Sascha Hermannski, SFB 1646