Vagueness: Two Myths
Vagueness: Two Myths

Summary/Abstract: Epistemicism about vagueness is the position that bivalence holds for every instance of a vague predicate, even if truth or falsity is unknowable in borderline cases. Epistemicism is accused of rejecting the tolerance intuition, and committing itself to sharp borderlines. Mainstream Epistemicists, like Williamson and Sorensen, accept these accusations as costs of their view. I argue instead that both are myths. First, I argue our intuitions support only generic, dense tolerance principles, which are non-paradoxical. Epistemicists can affirm these principles, without inferring any paradoxical principle, and so can embrace the tolerance intuition. Second, bivalence is perfectly compatible with the denial of sharp borderlines, provided that we model the extension of vague predicates as scattered stochastically and non-monotonically across a gradient, just as we should expect if meaning depends on use. My revisionary form of epistemicism better balances our intuitions about vagueness with the conservation of bivalence.

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