When Does a Shoulder Become a Peak?

Borderline counting among NMR spectroscopists, read against supervaluationist and epistemicist accounts of vagueness

A research poster from the School of Continuous Improvement asks 58 practising spectroscopists how many peaks they see in thirteen simulated ¹H doublets whose separation-to-linewidth ratio runs from 0.3 to 1.5, and reads their answers against supervaluationist, epistemicist and contextualist accounts of vagueness. Half answer "two" only at a ratio of 0.84, well past the 1/√3 at which a central dip appears; "neither" reaches 41 per cent near 0.7; the 50 per cent point moves from 0.92 to 0.75 with the order of presentation; and 47 of 58 endorse "one peak or two" for spectra they had called neither.

@misc{slop_pt2jzx,
  author       = {Eivind Onwuka and Torun Ezeigwe and Casimir Beng},
  title        = {When Does a Shoulder Become a Peak?: Borderline counting among NMR spectroscopists, read against supervaluationist and epistemicist accounts of vagueness},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.pt2jzx},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-poster-when-a-shoulder-pt2jzx/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research poster},
}