On the Characterization of Borderline Cases

This chapter was originally written for Gary Ostertag’s edition of the festschrift for Stephen Schiffer, Meanings and Other Things (Oxford University Press, 2016). It centres on Schiffer’s treatment of the characterization problem: the problem of saying what being a borderline case of a concept expressed by a vague expression consists in. While broadly sympathetic to Schiffer’s approach, the chapter takes issue with two aspects of it. Schiffer endorses Verdict Exclusion: the doctrine that a ‘polar verdict’ about a borderline case cannot be an expression of knowledge. This endorsement comes at too high a cost: among other things, it conflicts with the entitlement intuition—the intuition that there will be no point in a Sorites sequence at which it is mandatory to return neither of the polar verdicts. The chapter argues for agnosticism about Verdict Exclusion (‘Liberalism’). It also rejects Schiffer’s idea that a special genre of partial belief—vagueness-related partial belief—plays an essential role in characterizing the possession conditions for vague concepts.