Vagueness

First published Sat Feb 8, 1997; substantive revision Mon Mar 12, 2012

Sorensen, Roy, "Vagueness", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer

2012 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =
<http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2012/entries/vagueness/>.

There is wide agreement that a term is vague to the extent that it has borderline cases.
This makes the notion of a borderline case crucial in accounts of vagueness. I shall
concentrate on an historical characterization of borderline cases that most
commentators would accept. Vagueness will then be contrasted with ambiguity and
generality. This will clarify the nature of the philosophical challenge posed by
vagueness. I will then discuss some rival theories of vagueness with an emphasis on
many-valued logic, supervaluationism and contextualism. I will conclude with the
issue of whether all vagueness is linguistic.

 1. Inquiry Resistance
 2. Comparison with Ambiguity and Generality
 3. The Philosophical Challenge Posed by Vagueness
 4. Many-valued Logic
 5. Supervaluationism
 6. Subvaluationism
 7. Contextualism
 8. Is All Vagueness Linguistic?
 Bibliography
 Academic Tools
 Other Internet Resources
 Related Entries

1. Inquiry Resistance

If you cut one head off of a two headed man, have you decapitated him? What is the
maximum height of a short man? When does a fertilized egg develop into a person?

These questions are impossible to answer because they involve absolute borderline
cases. In the vast majority of cases, the unknowability of a borderline statement is
only relative to a given means of settling the issue (Sorensen 2001, chapter 1). For
instance, a boy may count as a borderline case of ‘obese’ because people cannot tell
whether he is obese just by looking at him. A curious mother could try to settle the
matter by calculating her son's body mass index. The formula is to divide his weight
(in kilograms) by the square of his height (in meters). If the value exceeds 30, this test
counts him as obese. The calculation will itself leave some borderline cases. The
mother could then use a weight-for-height chart. These charts are not entirely decisive
because they do not reflect the ratio of fat to muscle, whether the child has large
bones, and so on. The boy will only count as an absolute borderline case of ‘obese’ if
no possible method of inquiry could settle whether he is obese. When we reach this
stage, we start to suspect that our uncertainty is due to the concept of obesity rather
than to our limited means of testing for obesity.
Absolute borderline cases are targeted by Charles Sander Peirce's entry for ‘vague’ in
the 1902 Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology:

A proposition is vague when there are possible states of things

concerning which it is intrinsically uncertain whether, had they been
contemplated by the speaker, he would have regarded them as
excluded or allowed by the proposition. By intrinsically uncertain we
mean not uncertain in consequence of any ignorance of the interpreter,
but because the speaker's habits of language were indeterminate.
(Peirce 1902, 748)

In the case of relative borderline cases, the question is clear but our means for
answering it are incomplete. In the case of absolute borderline cases, there is
incompleteness in the question itself.

When a term is applied to one of its absolute borderline cases the result is a statement
that resists all attempts to settle whether it is true or false. No amount of conceptual
analysis or empirical inquiry can settle whether removing one head from a two headed
man counts as decapitating him. We could give the appearance of settling the matter
by stipulating that ‘decapitate’ means ‘remove a head’ (as opposed to ‘make headless’
or ‘remove the head’ or ‘remove the most important head’). But that would amount to
changing the topic to an issue that merely sounds the same as decapitation.

Vagueness is standardly defined as the possession of borderline cases. For example,

‘tall’ is vague because a man who is 1.8 meters in height is neither clearly tall nor
clearly non-tall. No amount of conceptual analysis or empirical investigation can
settle whether a 1.8 meter man is tall. Borderline cases are inquiry resistant. Indeed,
the inquiry resistance typically recurses. For in addition to the unclarity of the
borderline case, there is normally unclarity as to where the unclarity begins. In other
words ‘borderline case’ has borderline cases. This higher order vagueness seems to
show that ‘vague’ is vague.

Higher order vagueness appears to condemn us to draw a sharp line somewhere. If the
line is not drawn between the true and the false, then it will be between the true and
the intermediate state. Introducing further intermediates just delays the inevitable.

The only way out is to reject a presupposition of the problem. Accordingly, several
philosophers characterize higher order vagueness as an illusion (Wright 2010). They
deny that there is an open-ended iteration of borderline status. Speakers do not go
around talking about borderline borderline cases and borderline borderline borderline
cases and so forth (Raffman 2005, 23).

Defenders of higher order vagueness say that ordinary speakers avoid iterating
‘borderline’ for the same reason they avoid iterating ‘million’ or ‘know’. The
iterations are confusing but perfectly meaningful. ‘Borderline’ behaves just like a
vague predicate. For instance, ‘borderline’ can be embedded in a sorites argument.
Defenders of higher order vagueness have also tried to clinch the case with particular
specimens such as borderline hermaphrodites (reasoning that these individuals are
borderline borderline males) (Sorensen 2010).
2. Comparison with Ambiguity and Generality

‘Tall’ is relative. A 1.8 meter pygmy is tall for a pygmy but a 1.8 meter Masai is not
tall for a Masai. Although relativization disambiguates, it does not eliminate
borderline cases. There are shorter pygmies who are borderline tall for a pygmy and
taller Masai who are borderline tall for a Masai. The direct bearers of vagueness are a
word's full disambiguations such as ‘tall for an eighteenth century French man’.
Words are only vague indirectly, by virtue of having a sense that is vague. In contrast,
an ambiguous word bears its ambiguity directly—simply in virtue of having multiple
meanings.

This contrast between vagueness and ambiguity is obscured by the fact that most
words are both vague and ambiguous. ‘Child’ is ambiguous between ‘offspring’ and
‘immature offspring’. The latter reading of ‘child’ is vague because there are
borderline cases of immature offspring. The contrast is further complicated by the fact
that most words are also general. For instance, ‘child’ covers both boys and girls.

Ambiguity and vagueness also contrast with respect to the speaker's discretion. If a
word is ambiguous, the speaker can resolve the ambiguity without departing from
literal usage. For instance, he can declare that he meant ‘child’ to express the concept
of an immature offspring. If a word is vague, the speaker cannot resolve the
borderline case. For instance, the speaker cannot make ‘child’ literally mean anyone
under eighteen just by intending it. That concept is not, as it were, on the menu
corresponding to ‘child’. He would be understood as taking a special liberty with the
term to suit a special purpose. This departure from ordinary usage would relieve him
of the obligation to defend the sharp cut-off.

When the movie director Alfred Hitchcock mused ‘All actors are children’ he was
taking liberties with clear negative cases of ‘child’ rather than its borderline cases.
The aptness of his generalization is not judged by its literal truth-value (because it is
obviously untrue). Likewise, we do not judge precisifications of borderline cases by
their truth-values (because they are obviously not ascertainable as true or false). We
instead judge precisifications by their simplicity, conservativeness, and fruitfulness. A
precisification that draws the line across the borderline cases conserves more
paradigm usage than one that draws the line across clear cases. But conservatism is
just one desideratum among many. Sometimes the best balance is achieved at the cost
of turning former positive cases into negative cases.

Once we shift from literal to figurative usage, we gain fictive control over our entire
vocabulary—not just vague words. When a travel agent says ‘France is a hexagon’,
we do not infer that she has committed the geometrical error of classifying France as a
six sided polygon. We instead interpret the travel agent as speaking figuratively, as
meaning that France is shaped like a hexagon. Similarly, when the travel agent says
‘Reno is the biggest little city’, we do not interpret her as overlooking the vagueness
of ‘little city’. Just as she uses the obvious falsehood of ‘France is a hexagon’ to
signal a metaphor, she uses the obvious indeterminacy of ‘Reno is the biggest little
city’ to signal hyperbole.
Given that speakers lack any literal discretion over vague terms, we ought not to chide
them for indecisiveness. Where there is no decision to be made, there is no scope for
vice.

Speakers would have literal discretion if statements applying a predicate to its

borderline cases were just permissible variations in linguistic usage. For instance,
Crispin Wright and Stewart Shapiro say a competent speaker can faultlessly classify
the borderline case as a positive instance while another competent speaker can
faultlessly classify the case as a negative instance.

For the sake of comparison, consider discretion between alternative spellings.

Professor Letterman uses ‘judgment’ instead of ‘judgement’ because he wants to
promote the principle that a silent E signals a long vowel. He still has fond memories
of Tom Lehrer's 1971 children's song “Silent E”:

Who can turn a can into a cane?

Who can turn a pan into a pane?
It's not too hard to see,
It's Silent E.

Who can turn a cub into a cube?

Who can turn a tub into a tube?
It's elementary
For Silent E.

Professor Letterman disapproves of those who add the misleading E but concedes that
‘judgement’ is a permissible spelling; he does not penalize his students for misspelling
when they make their hard-hearted choice of ‘judgement’. Indeed, like other
professors, he scolds students if they fail to stick with the same spelling throughout
the composition. Choose but stick to your choice!

Professor Letterman's assertion ‘The word for my favorite mental act is spelled j-u-d-
g-m-e-n-t’ is robust with respect to the news that it is also spelled j-u-d-g-e-m-e-n-t.
He would continue to assert it. He can conjoin the original assertion with information
about the alternative: ‘The word for my favorite mental act is spelled j-u-d-g-m-e-n-t
and is also spelled j-u-d-g-e-m-e-n-t’. In contrast, Professor Letterman's assertion that
‘Martha is a woman’ is not robust with respect to the news that Martha is a borderline
case of ‘woman’ (say, Letterman learns Martha is younger than she looks). The new
information would lead Letterman to retract his assertion in favor of a hedged remark
such as ‘Martha might be a woman and Martha might not be a woman’. Professor
Letterman's loss of confidence is hard to explain if the information about her
borderline status were simply news of a different but permissible way of describing
her. Discoveries of notational variants do not warrant changes in former beliefs.

News of borderline status has an evidential character. Loss of clarity brings loss of
warrant. If you do not lower your confidence, you are open to the charge of
dogmatism. To concede that Martha is a borderline case of ‘woman’ is to concede that
you do not know that she is a woman. That is why debates can be dissolved by
showing that the dispute is over a borderline case. The debaters should be agnostic if
they are dealing with a borderline case. They do not have a license to form beliefs
beyond their evidence.

News of an alternative sense is like news of an alternative spelling; there is no

evidential impact (except for meta-linguistic beliefs about the nature of words). Your
assertion that ‘All bachelors are men’ is robust with respect to the news that
‘bachelor’ has an alternative sense in which it means a male seal. Assertions are not
robust with respect to news of hidden generality. If a South African girl says ‘No
elephant can be domesticated’ but is then taught that there is another species of
elephant indigenous to Asia, then she will lose some confidence; maybe Asian
elephants can be domesticated. News of hidden generality has evidential impact.
When it comes to robustness, vagueness resembles generality more than vagueness
resembles ambiguity.

Mathematical terms such as ‘prime number’ show that a term can be general without
being vague. A term can also be vague without being general. Borderline cases of
analytically empty predicates illustrate this possibility.

Generality is obviously useful. Often, lessons about a particular F can be projected to

other Fs in virtue of their common F-ness. When a girl learns that her cat has a
nictating membrane that protects its eyes, she rightly expects her neighbor's cat also
has a nictating membrane. Generality saves labor. When the girl says that she wants a
toy rather than clothes, she narrows the range of acceptable gifts without going
through the trouble of specifying a particular gift. The girl also balances values: a gift
should be intrinsically desired and yet also be a surprise. If uncertain about which
channel is the weather channel, she can hedge by describing the channel as ‘forty-
something’. There is an inverse relationship between the contentfulness of a
proposition and its probability: the more specific a claim, the less likely it is to be
true. By gauging generality, we can make sensible trade-offs between truth and detail.

‘Vague’ has a sense which is synonymous with abnormal generality. This precipitates
many equivocal explanations of vagueness. For instance, many commentators say that
vagueness exists because broad categories ease the task of classification. If I can
describe your sweater as red, then I do not need to figure out whether it is scarlet. This
freedom to use wide intervals obviously helps us to learn, teach, communicate, and
remember. But so what? The problem is to explain the existence of borderline cases.
Are they present because vagueness serves a function? Or are borderline cases side-
effects of ordinary conversation—like echoes?

Every natural language is both vague and ambiguous. However, both features seem
eliminable. Indeed, both are eliminated in miniature languages such as checkers
notation, computer programming languages, and mathematical descriptions.
Moreover, it seems that both vagueness and ambiguity ought to be minimized.
‘Vague’ and ‘ambiguous’ are pejorative terms. And they deserve their bad reputations.
Think of all the automotive misery that has been prefaced by

Driver: Do I turn left?

Passenger: Right.
English can be lethal. Philosophers have long motivated appeals for an ideal language
by pointing out how ambiguity creates the menace of equivocation:

No child should work.

Every person is a child of someone.
Therefore, no one should work.

Happily, we know how to criticize and correct all equivocations. Indeed, every natural
language is self-disambiguating in the sense that each has all the resources needed to
uniquely specify any reading one desires. Ambiguity is often the cause but rarely the
object of philosophical rumination.

3. The Philosophical Challenge Posed by Vagueness

Vagueness, in contrast, precipitates a profound problem: the sorites paradox. For

instance,

Base step: A one day year old human being is a child.

Induction step: If an n day old human being is a child, then that human
being is also a child when it is n + 1 days old.

Conclusion: Therefore, a 36,500 day old human being is a child.

The conclusion is false because a 100 year old man is clearly a non-child. Since the
base step of the argument is also plainly true and the argument is valid by
mathematical induction, we seem to have no choice but to reject the second premise.

George Boolos (1991) observes that we have an autonomous case against the
induction step. In addition to implying plausible conditionals such as ‘If a 1 day old
human being is a child, then that human being is also a child when it is 2 days old’,
the induction step also implies ludicrous conditionals such as ‘If a 1 day old human
being is a child, then that human being is also a child when it is 36,500 days old’. For
some reason, we tend to overlook these easy counterexamples to the induction step.

With Boolos' helping hand, we have driven a second stake into the heart of the sorites
paradox. Yet the paradox seems far from dead. The negation of the second premise
classically implies a sharp threshold for childhood. For it implies the existential
generalization that there is a number n such that an n day old human being is a child
but is no longer a child one day later.

Epistemicists accept this astonishing consequence. They think vagueness is a form of

ignorance. Timothy Williamson (1994) traces the ignorance of the threshold for
childhood to “margin for error” principles. If one knows that an n day old human
being is a child, then that human being must also be a child when n + 1 days old.
Otherwise, one is right by luck. Given that there is a threshold, we would be ignorant
of its location.

Several critics focus on attitudes weaker than knowledge. According to Nicholas

Smith (2008, 182) we cannot guess that the threshold for baldness is the 400th hair.
Hartry Field (2010, 203) denies that a rational man can fear that he has just passed the
threshold into being old. Hope, speculation, and wonder do not require evidence but
they do require understanding. So it is revealing that these attitudes have trouble
getting a purchase on the threshold of oldness (or any other vague predicate). A
simple explanation is that bare linguistic competence gives us knowledge that are no
such thresholds. This accounts for the comical air of the epistemicist. Just as there is
no conceptual room to worry that there is a natural number between sixty and sixty
one, there is no conceptual room to worry that one has passed the threshold of oldness
between one's sixtieth and sixty first birthday.

An old epistemicist might reply: My piecemeal confidence that a given number is not
the threshold for oldness does not agglomerate into collective confidence that there is
no such number. If I bet against each number being the threshold, then I must have
placed a losing bet somewhere. For if I won each bet then there was no opportunity
for me to make the transition to oldness. My bookie could have made “Dutch book”
against me. He would have been entitled to payment without having to identify which
bet I lost. Since probabilities may be extracted from hypothetical betting behavior, I
must actually assign some small (normally negligible) probability to hypotheses
identifying particular thresholds. So must you.

Stephen Schiffer (2003, 204) denies that classical probability calculations apply in
vague contexts. Suppose Ned is borderline old and borderline bald. According to
Schiffer we should be just as confident in the conjunction ‘Ned is old and bald’ as in
either conjunct. Adding conjuncts does not reduce confidence because we have a
“vague partial belief”rather than the standard belief assumed by mathematicians
developing probability theory. Schiffer offers a calculus for this vagueness-related
propositional attitude. He crafts the rules for vague partial belief to provide a
psychological solution to the sorites paradox.

The project is complicated by the fact that vague partial beliefs interact with precise
beliefs (MacFarlane 2010). Consider a statement that has a mixture of vague and
precise conjuncts: ‘Ned is old and bald and has an even number of hairs’. Adding the
extra precise conjunct should diminish confidence. Schiffer also needs to
accommodate the fact that some speakers are undecided about whether the nature of
the uncertainty involves vagueness. Even an idealized speaker may unsure because
there is vagueness about the borders between vagueness related uncertainty and other
sorts of uncertainty.

Other commentators grant that it is logically possible that vague predicates have
thresholds. They just think it would be a miracle: “It is logically possible that the
words on this page will come to life and sort my socks. But I know enough about
words to dismiss this as a serious possibility. So I am right to boggle at the possibility
that our rough and ready terms such as ‘red’ could so sensitively classify objects.”
Epistemicists counter that this bafflement rests on an over-estimate of the role of
stipulation in meaning. Epistemicists say much meaning is acquired passively by
default rather than actively by decision.

Most philosophers doubt whether precise analytical tools fit vague arguments. H. G.
Wells was amongst the first to suggest that we must moderate the application of logic:
 Every species is vague, every term goes cloudy at its edges, and so in
my way of thinking, relentless logic is only another name for stupidity
—for a sort of intellectual pigheadedness. If you push a philosophical
or metaphysical enquiry through a series of valid syllogisms—never
committing any generally recognized fallacy—you nevertheless leave
behind you at each step a certain rubbing and marginal loss of
objective truth and you get deflections that are difficult to trace, at each
phase in the process. Every species waggles about in its definition,
every tool is a little loose in its handle, every scale has its individual.—
First and Last Things (1908)

Many more believe that the problem is with logic itself rather than the manner in
which it is applied. They favor solving the sorites paradox by replacing standard logic
with an earthier deviant logic.

There is a desperately wide range of opinions as to how the revision of logic should
be executed. Every form of deviant logic has been applied in the hope of resolving the
sorites paradox.

4. Many-valued Logic

An early favorite was many-valued logic. On this approach, borderline statements are
assigned truth-values that lie between full truth and full falsehood. Some logicians
favor three truth-values, others prefer four or five. The most popular approach is to
use an infinite number of truth-values represented by the real numbers between 0 (for
full falsehood) and 1 (for full truth). This infinite spectrum of truth-values might be
service for a continuous sorites argument involving ‘small real number’ (Weber and
Colyvan 2010).

Critics object that this proliferation of truth-values exacerbates the over-precision of

classical logic. Instead of having just one artificially sharp line between the truth and
the false, the many-valued logician has infinitely many sharp lines such as that
between statements with a truth of of .323483925 and those with a higher truth-value.
In Mark Sainsbury's words, “… you do not improve a bad idea by iterating it.” (1996,
255)

A proponent of an infinite valued logic might reply to Sainsbury with an analogy. It is

a bad idea to model a circle with a straight line. Using two lines is not much better,
nor is there is much improvement using a three sided polygon (a triangle). But as we
add more straight lines to the polygon (square, pentagon, hexagon, and so on) we
make progress—by iterating the bad idea of modeling a circle with straight lines.

Indeed, it would be tempting to triumphantly conclude ‘The circle has been modeled
as an infinitely sided polygon’. This victory declaration would itself need
clarification. Has the circle been revealed to be an infinitely sided polygon? Have
curved lines been replaced by straight lines? Have curved lines (and hence circles)
been proven to not exist? A model can succeed without it being clear what has been
achieved.
But it is premature to dwell on the simile ‘Precision is to vagueness as straightness is
to curvature’. The many-valued logician must first vindicate the analogy by providing
details about how to calculate the truth-values of vague statements from the truth-
values of their component statements.

Proponents of many-valued logic approach this obligation with great industry. Precise
new rules are introduced to calculate the truth value of compound statements that
contain statements with intermediate truth-values. For instance, the revised rule for
conjunctions is to assign the conjunction the same truth-value as the conjunct with the
lowest truth-value.

These rules are designed to yield all standard theorems when all the truth values are 1
and 0. In this sense, classical logic is a limiting case of many-valued logic. Classical
logic is agreed to work fine in the area for which it was designed—mathematics.

Most theorems of standard logic break down when intermediate truth-values are
involved. (An irregular minority, such as ‘If P, then P’, survive.) Even the classical
contradiction ‘Bozo is bald and it is not the case that he is bald’ receives a truth-value
of .5 when ‘Bozo is bald’ has a truth-value of .5. Many-valued logicians note that the
error they are imputing to classical logic is often so small that classical logic can still
be fruitfully applied. But they insist that the sorites paradox illustrates how tiny errors
can accumulate into a big error.

Critics of the many-valued approach complain that it botches phenomena such as

hedging. If I regard you as a borderline case of ‘tall man’, I cannot sincerely assert
that you are tall and I cannot sincerely assert that you are of average height. But I can
assert the hedged claim ‘You are tall or of average height’. The many-valued rule for
disjunction is to assign the whole statement the truth-value of its highest disjunct.
Normally, the added disjunct in a hedged claim is not more plausible than the other
disjuncts. Thus it cannot increase the degree of truth. Disappointingly, the proponent
of many-valued logic cannot trace the increase of assertibility to an increase the
degree of truth.

Epistemicists explain the rise in assertibility by the increasing probability of truth.

Since the addition of disjuncts can raise probability indefinitely, the epistemicists
correctly predict that we can hedge our way to full assertibility. However,
epistemicists do not have a monopoly on this prediction.

5. Supervaluationism

According to supervaluationists, borderline statements lack a truth-value. This neatly

explains why it is universally impossible to know the truth-value of a borderline
statement. Supervaluationists offer details about the nature of absolute borderline
cases. Simple sentences about borderline cases lack a truth-value. Compounds of
these statements can have a truth-value if they come out true regardless of how the
statement is precisified. For instance, ‘Either Mr. Stoop is tall or it is not the case that
Mr. Stoop is tall’ is true because it comes out true under all ways of sharpening ‘tall’.
Thus the method of supervaluations allows one to retain all the theorems of standard
logic while admitting “truth-value gaps”.
One may wonder whether this striking result is a genuine convergence with standard
logic. Is the supervaluationist characterizing vague statements as propositions? Or is
he merely pointing out that certain non-propositions have a structure isomorphic to
logical theorems? (Some electrical circuits are isomorphic to tautologies but this does
not make the circuits tautologies.) Kit Fine (1975, 282), and especially David Lewis
(1982), characterize vagueness as hyper-ambiguity. Instead of there being one vague
concept, there are many precise concepts that closely resemble each other. ‘Child’ can
mean a human being at most one day old or mean a human being at most two days old
or mean a human being at most three days old …. Thus the logic of vagueness is a
logic for equivocators. Lewis' idea is that ambiguous statements are true when they
come out true under all disambiguations. But logicians normally require that a
statement be disambiguated before logic is applied. The mere fact that an ambiguous
statement comes out true under all its disambiguations does not show that the
statement itself is true. Sentences which are actually disambiguated may have truth-
values. But the best that can be said of those that merely could be disambiguated is
that they would have had a truth-value had they been disambiguated (Tye 1989).

Supervaluationism will converge with classical logic only if each word of the
supervaluated sentence is uniformly interpreted. For instance, ‘Either a carbon copy
of Teddy Roosevelt's signature is an autograph or it is not the case that a carbon copy
of Teddy Roosevelt's signature is an autograph’ comes out true only if ‘autograph’ is
interpreted the same way in both disjuncts. Vague sentences resist mixed
interpretations. However, mixed interpretations are permissible for ambiguous
sentences. As Lewis himself notes in a criticism of relevance logic, ‘Scrooge walked
along the bank on his way to the bank’ can receive a mixed disambiguation. When
exterminators offer ‘non-toxic ant poison’, we charitably switch relativizations within
the noun phrase: the substance is safe for human beings but deadly for ants.

Even if one agrees that supervaluationism converges with classical logic about
theoremhood, they clearly differ in other respects. Supervaluationism requires
rejection of inference rules such as contraposition, conditional proof and reductio ad
absurdum (Williamson 1994, 151–152). In the eyes of the supervaluationist, a
demonstration that a statement is not true does not guarantee that the statement is
false.

The supervaluationist is also under pressure to reject semantic principles which are
intimately associated with the application of logical laws. According to Alfred Tarski's
Convention T, a statement ‘S’ is true if and only if S. In other words, truth is
disquotational. Supervaluationists say that being supertrue (being true under all
precisifications) suffices for being true. But given Convention T, supertruth would
then be disquotational. Since the supervaluationists accept the principle of excluded
middle, they would be forced to say ‘P’ is supertrue or ‘Not P’ is supertrue (even if
‘P’ applies a predicate to a borderline case). This would imply that either ‘P’ is true or
‘Not P’ is true. (Williamson 1994, 162–163) And that would be a fatal loss of truth-
value gaps for supervaluationism.

There is a final concern about the “ontological honesty” of the supervaluationist's

existential quantifier. As part of his solution to the sorites paradox, the
supervaluationist will assert ‘There is a human being who was a child when n days
old but not when n + 1 days old’. For this statement comes out true under all
admissible precisifications of ‘child’. However, when pressed the supervaluationist
will add an unofficial clarification: “Oh, of course I do not mean that there really is a
sharp threshold for childhood.”

After the clarification, some wonder how supervaluationism differs from drastic
metaphysical skepticism. In his nihilist days, Peter Unger (1979) admitted that it is
useful to talk as if there are children. But he insisted that strictly speaking, vague
terms such as ‘child’ cannot apply to anything. Unger was free to use
supervaluationism as a theory to explain our ordinary discourse about children.
(Unger instead used other resources to explain how we fruitfully apply empty
predicates.) But once the dust had cleared and the precise rubble came into focus,
Unger had to conclude that there are no children.

Officially, the supervaluationist rejects the induction step of the sorites argument.
Unofficially, he seems to instead reject the base step of the sorites argument.

6. Subvaluationism

Supervaluationism is also haunted by a logical analogy. Whereas the supervaluationist

analyzes borderline cases in terms of truth-value gaps the dialetheist analyzes them in
terms of truth-value gluts. A glut is a proposition that is both true and false. The rule
for assigning gluts is the mirror image of the rule for assigning gaps: A statement is
true exactly if it comes out true on at least one precisification. The statement is false
just if it comes out false on at least one precisification. So if the statement comes out
true under one precisification and false under another precisification, the statement is
both true and false.

To avoid triviality, the dialetheist must adopt a logic that stops two contradictory
statements from jointly implying everything. The resulting “subvaluationism” is an
ingenious dual of supervaluationism. Viewed formally, there seems no more reason to
prefer one departure from classical logic rather than the other. Since Western
philosophers abominate contradiction, parity with dialetheism would diminish the
great popularity of supervaluationism.

A Machiavellian epistemicist will welcome this battle between the gaps and the gluts.
He roots for the weaker side. Although he does not want the subvaluationist to win,
the Machiavellian epistemicist does want the subvaluationist to achieve mutual
annihilation with his supervaluationist doppelgänger. His political calculation is: Gaps
+ Gluts = Bivalence.

Pablo Corberos (2011) has argued that subvaluationism provides a better treatment of
higher order vagueness than supervaluationism. But for the most part, the
subvaluationists (and their frenemies) have merely claimed subvaluationism to be at
least as attractive as supervaluationism (Hyde and Colyvan 2008). This modest
ambition seems prudent. After all, truth-value gaps have far more independent support
from the history of philosophy. Prior to the explosive growth of vagueness research
after 1975, ordinary language philosophers amassed a panoramic battery of analyses
suggesting that gaps are involved in presupposition, reference failure, fiction, future
contingent propositions, performatives, and so on and so on. Supervaluationism
rigorously consolidated these appeals to ordinary language.
Dialetheists characterize intolerance for contradiction as a shallow phenomenon,
restricted to a twentieth Western academic milieu (maybe even now being eclipsed by
the rise of China). Experimental philosophers have challenged the old appeals to
ordinary language with empirical results suggesting that glutty talk is as readily
stimulated by borderline cases as gappy talk (Alxatib and Pelletier 2011, Ripley
2011).

7. Contextualism

Just as contextualism in epistemology runs orthogonal to the familiar divisions

amongst epistemologists (foundationalism, reliabilism, coherentism, etc.), there are
contextualists of every persuasion amongst vagueness theorists. They develop an
analogy between the sorites paradox and indexical sophistries such as:

1. Base step: The horizon is more than 1 meter away.

2. Induction step: If the horizon is more than n meters away, then it is

more than n + 1 meters away.

3. Conclusion: The horizon is more than a billion meters away.

The horizon is where the earth meets the sky and is certainly less than a billion meters
away. (The circumference of the earth is only forty million meters.) Yet when you
travel toward the horizon to specify the n at which the induction step fails, your trip is
as futile as the pursuit of the rainbow. You cannot reach the horizon because it shifts
with your location.

All contextualists accuse the sorites monger of equivocating. In one sense, the
meaning of ‘child’ is uniform; the context-invariant rule for using the term (its
“character”) is constant. However, the set of things to which the term applies (its
“content”) shifts with the context. In this respect, vague words resemble indexical
terms such as: I, you, here, now, today, tomorrow. When a debtor tells his creditor on
Monday ‘I will pay you back tomorrow’ and then repeats the sentence on Tuesday,
there is a sense in which he has said the same thing (the character is the same) and a
sense in which he has said something different (the content has shifted because
‘tomorrow’ now picks out Wednesday).

According to the contextualists, the rules governing the shifts prohibit us from
interpreting any instance of the induction step as having a true antecedent and a false
consequent. The very process of trying to refute the induction step changes the
context so that the instance will not come out false. Indeed, contextualists typically
emphasize that each instance is true and so compel our assent. Direct attacks on the
induction step can never be successful. One is put in mind of Seneca's admonition to
his student Nero: “However many you put to death, you will never kill your
successor.”

How strictly are we to take the comparison between vague words and indexical
terms? Scott Soames (2002, 445) answers that all vague words literally are indexical.
This straightforward response is open to the objection that the sorites monger could
stabilize reference. When the sorites monger relativizes ‘horizon’ to the northeast
corner of the Empire State Building's observation deck, he seems to generate a
genuine sorites paradox that exploits the vagueness of ‘horizon’ (not its indexicality).

All natural languages have stabilizing pronouns, ellipsis, and other anaphoric devices.
For instance, in ‘Jack is tired now and Jill is too’, the ‘too’ forces a uniform reading of
‘tired’. Jason Stanley suggests that the sorites monger employ the premise:

If that1 is a child then that 2 is too, and if that 2 is too, then that3 is too,
and if that3 is too, then that4 is too, … and then thati is too.

Each ‘thatn’ refers to the nth element in a sequence of worsening examples of ‘child’.
The meaning of ‘child’ is not shifting because the first occurrence of the term governs
all the subsequent clauses (thanks to ‘too’). If vague terms were literally indexical, the
sorites monger would have a strong reply. If vague terms only resemble indexicals,
then the contextualist needs to develop the analogy in a way that circumvents
Stanley's counsel to the sorites monger.

There is certainly no shortage of more guarded contextualists. Hans Kamp, the

founder of contextualism, maintained that the extension of vague words orbits the
speaker's store of conversational commitments. In a more psychological vein, Diana
Raffman says changes in context trigger gestalt shifts between look-alike categories.

Stewart Shapiro integrates Kamp's ideas with Friedrich Waismann's concept of open
texture. Shapiro thinks speakers have discretion over borderline cases because they
are judgment dependent. They come out true in virtue of the speaker judging them to
be true. Given that the audience does not resist, borderline cases of ‘child’ can be
correctly described as children. The audience recognizes that other competent
speakers could describe the borderline case differently. As Waismann lyricizes “Every
description stretches, as it were, into a horizon of open possibilities: However far I go,
I shall always carry this horizon with me.” (1968, 122)

American pragmaticism colors Delia Graff Fara's contextualism. Consider dandelion

farms. Why would someone grow weeds? The answer is that ‘weed’ is relative to
interests. Dandelions are unwanted by lawn caretakers but are wanted by farmers for
food, wine, and medical uses. Delia Fara thinks this interest relativity extends to all
vague words. For instance, ‘child’ means a degree of immaturity that is significant to
the speaker. Since the interests of the speaker shifts over time, there is an opportunity
for a shift in the extension of ‘child’. Graff is reluctant to describe herself as a
contextualist because the context only has an indirect effect on the extension via the
changes it makes to the speaker's interest.

The first challenge for the contextualist is to find enough shiftiness to block every
sorites argument. Since vagueness reaches into every syntactic category, critics
complain that contextualism is exceeds the level of ambiguity countenanced by
linguistics and psycholinguists. Analogy: hydrologists agree there is much hidden
water but all hydrologists are scientifically committed to denying Thales' claim that
all is water.
Another concern is that some sorites arguments involve predicates that do not give us
an opportunity to equivocate. Consider a sorites with a base step that starts from a
number too large for us to think about. (There are infinitely many of these.) Or
consider an inductive predicate that is too complex for us to reason with. One
example is obtained by iterating ‘mother of’ a thousand times (Sorensen 2001, 33).
This predicate could be embedded in a mind numbing sorites that would never
generate context shifts.

Other unthinkable sorites argument use predicates that can only be grasped by
individuals in other possible worlds or by creatures with different types of minds than
ours. More fancifully, there could be a vague predicate, such as Saul Kripke's “killer
yellow”, that instantly kills anyone who thinks about it. The basic problem is that
contextualism is a psychologistic theory of the sorites. Arguments can exist without
being propounded.

8. Is All Vagueness Linguistic?

Supervaluationists encourage the view that all vagueness is a matter of linguistic

indecision: the reason why there are borderline cases is that we have not bothered to
make up our minds. Many supervaluationists maintain that this indecision is
functional. Instead of committing ourselves prematurely, we can fill in meanings as
we go along in light of new information and interests. This conjecture is promising for
the highly stipulative enterprise of promulgating and enforcing laws (Endicott 2000).
Judges frequently seem to exercise and control discretion by means of vague
language.

Discretion through gap-filling pleases those who regard adjudication as a creative

process. It alarms those think we should be judged by laws rather than men. The
doctrine of discretion through indeterminacy has also been questioned on grounds that
the source of the discretion is the generality of the legal terms rather than their
vagueness (Poscher 2012).

Supervaluationists emphasize the distinction between words and objects. Objects

themselves do not seem to be the sort of thing that can be general, ambiguous, or
vague (Eklund 2011). From this perspective, Georg Hegel appears to be committing a
category mistake when he characterizes clouds as vague. Although we sometimes
speak of clouds being ambiguous or even being general to a region, this does not
entitle us to infer that there is metaphysical ambiguity or metaphysical generality.

Supervaluationists are here incorporating an orthodoxy dating back to Bertrand

Russell's seminal article “Vagueness” (1923). This consensus was re-affirmed by
Michael Dummett (1975) and regularly re-avowed by subsequent commentators.

In 1978 Gareth Evans focused opposition to vague objects with a short proof modeled
after Saul Kripke's attack on contingent identity. If there is a vague object, then some
statement of the form ‘a = b’ must be vague (where each of the flanking singular
terms precisely designates that object). For the vagueness is allegedly due to the
object rather than its representation. But any statement of form ‘a = a’ is definitely
true. Consequently, a has the property of being definitely identical to a. Since a = b,
then b must also have the property of being definitely identical to a. Therefore ‘a = b’
must be definitely true!

Evans agrees that there are vague identity statements in which one of the flanking
terms is vague (just as Kripke agree that there are contingent identity statements when
one of the flanking terms is a flaccid designator). But then the vagueness is due to
language, not the world.

Despite Evans' impressive assault, there was a renewal of interest in vague objects in
the 1980s. As a precedent for this revival, Peter van Inwagen (1990, 283) recalls that
in the 1960s, there was a consensus that all necessity is linguistic. Most philosophers
now take the possibility of essential properties seriously.

Some of the reasons are technical. Problems with Kripke's refutation of contingent
identity tend to have structural parallels that affect Evans' proof. Evans also relies on
inferences that deviant logicians challenge (Parsons 2000).

In the absence of a decisive reductio ad absurdum , many logicians feel their role to
be the liberal one of articulating the logical space for vague objects. There should be
“Vague objects for those who want them” (Cowles and White 1991). Logic should be
ontologically neutral.

Some non-enemies of vague objects also have an ambition to consolidate various

species of indeterminacy (Barnes and Williams 2011). Talk of indeterminacy is found
in quantum mechanics, analyses of the open future, fictional incompleteness, and the
continuum hypothesis. Perhaps vagueness is just one face of indeterminacy.

This panoramic vision contrasts with the continuing resolution of many to tether
vagueness to the sorites paradox (Eklund 2011). They fear that the clarity achieved by
semantic ascent will be muddied by metaphysics.

But maybe the mud is already on the mountain top. Trenton Merricks (2001) claims
that standard characterizations of linguistic vagueness rely on metaphysical
vagueness. If ‘Bozo is bald’ lacks a truth-value because there is no fact to make the
statement true, then the shortage appears to be ontological.

The view that vagueness is always linguistic has been attacked from other directions.
Consider the vagueness of maps (Varzi 2001). The vagueness is pictorial rather than
discursive. So one cannot conclude that vagueness is linguistic merely from the
premise that vagueness is representational.

Or consider vague instrumental music such as Claude Debussy's “The Clouds”. Music
has syntax but too little semantics to qualify as language. There is a little diffuse
reference through devices such as musical quotation, leitmotifs, and homages. These
referential devices are not precise. Therefore, some music is vague (Sorensen 2010).
The strength and significance of this argument depends on the relationship between
music and language. Under the musilanguage hypothesis, language and music
branched off from a common “musilanguage” with language specializing in semantics
and music specializing in the expression of emotion. This scenario makes it plausible
that purely instrumental music could have remnants of semantic meaning.
Mental imagery also seems vague. When rising suddenly after a prolonged crouch, I
“see stars before my eyes”. I can tell there are more than ten of these hallucinated
lights but I cannot tell how many. Is this indeterminacy in thought to be reduced to
indeterminacy in language? Why not vice versa? Language is an outgrowth of human
psychology. Thus it seems natural to view language as merely an accessible
intermediate bearer of vagueness.

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