‘Wang’s Paradox’
This chapter, specially written for the 2007 Schilp volume in his honour, revisits Sir Michael Dummett’s seminal contribution to the debates about vagueness in his ipsonymous 1975 paper. The chapter again rejects both the conception of vagueness as any kind of semantic incompleteness and Epistemicism, and critiques Dummett’s own suggestion of Incoherentism, returning again to the governing view and the question of the sense, if any, in which vague expressions should be thought of as governed by semantic rules. The Sorites for phenomenal predicates, ‘looks red’ and its ilk, receives special focus. It is argued that the correct response is that the competent use of these and other vague expressions is, in a certain sense, unprincipled: their vagueness is a phenomenon of reactive judgement unsupported by reasons. This conception enforces Agnosticism about Bivalence and a consequent repudiation of the validity of double negation elimination.