Appendix to Chapter 14

In the Forced March Sorites, there is no deductive path to a formal contradiction. Rather, a hapless subject is required to return a verdict in point of F-ness about each successive element in a soritical series for F. Competence requires the appropriate verdicts concerning the clear cases at the poles. Hence, since the verdicts required at the poles are different, the subject must at some point give some kind of differential responses to an adjacent pair of elements between which—for so the series is constructed—she can discern no relevant difference. Since it is a form of incompetence to purport to discriminate cases between which one discerns no relevant difference, it appears to follow that consistently competent use of F throughout the series is metaphysically impossible. It is argued that the intuitionist conception of vagueness provides the means to explain nicely why a differential response need not implicate discrimination.