The Epistemic Conception of Vagueness

This chapter challenges Epistemicism. It rebuts Williamson’s arguments for unrestricted Bivalence, based on the Disquotational Scheme for the truth predicate, and Sorensen’s arguments that the idea of a predicate’s being of limited sensitivity is itself incoherent. The chapter nevertheless proposes a broadly epistemic conception of what a definite case of a vague predicate is—namely, a case where at least one of two conflicting verdicts about a vague predication must involve some kind of cognitive shortcoming, and proposes a corresponding notion of a borderline case—one where each of a pair of conflicting verdicts can be unexceptionable—and sides with Epistemicism in rejecting the idea of such cases as truth-value gaps. It is contended that Williamson’s explanation of why we cannot know where the putative sharp cut-offs in Sorites series come at best explains too little, since it has nothing plausible to say about our ignorance throughout a borderline area, nor about vagueness induced by deliberate approximation—‘roughly six feet tall’, ‘about a metre long’.