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Vagueness
First published Sat Feb 8, 1997; substantive revision Thu Apr 5, 2018
There is wide agreement that a term is vague to the extent that it has borderline cases.
This makes the notion of a borderline case crucial in accounts of vagueness. I shall
concentrate on an historical characterization of borderline cases that most commentators
would accept. Vagueness will then be contrasted with ambiguity and generality. This will
clarify the nature of the philosophical challenge posed by vagueness. I will then discuss
some rival theories of vagueness with an emphasis on many-valued logic,
supervaluationism and contextualism. I will conclude with the issue of whether all
vagueness is linguistic.
1. Inquiry Resistance
2. Comparison with Ambiguity and Generality
3. The Philosophical Challenge Posed by Vagueness
4. Many-valued Logic
5. Supervaluationism
6. Subvaluationism
7. Contextualism
8. Is All Vagueness Linguistic?
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1. Inquiry Resistance
If you cut one head off of a two headed man, have you decapitated him? What is the
maximum height of a short man? When does a fertilized egg develop into a person?
These questions are impossible to answer because they involve absolute borderline cases.
In the vast majority of cases, the unknowability of a borderline statement is only relative
to a given means of settling the issue (Sorensen 2001, chapter 1). For instance, a boy may
count as a borderline case of ‘obese’ because people cannot tell whether he is obese just
by looking at him. A curious mother could try to settle the matter by calculating her son’s
body mass index. The formula is to divide his weight (in kilograms) by the square of his
height (in meters). If the value exceeds 30, this test counts him as obese. The calculation
will itself leave some borderline cases. The mother could then use a weight-for-height
chart. These charts are not entirely decisive because they do not reflect the ratio of fat to
muscle, whether the child has large bones, and so on. The boy will only count as an
absolute borderline case of ‘obese’ if no possible method of inquiry could settle whether
he is obese. When we reach this stage, we start to suspect that our uncertainty is due to
the concept of obesity rather than to our limited means of testing for obesity.
Absolute borderline cases are targeted by Charles Sander Peirce’s entry for ‘vague’ in the
1902 Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology:
A proposition is vague when there are possible states of things concerning which it
is intrinsically uncertain whether, had they been contemplated by the speaker, he would
have regarded them as excluded or allowed by the proposition. By intrinsically uncertain
we mean not uncertain in consequence of any ignorance of the interpreter, but because
the speaker’s habits of language were indeterminate. (Peirce 1902, 748)
In the case of relative borderline cases, the question is clear but our means for answering
it are incomplete. In the case of absolute borderline cases, there is incompleteness in the
question itself.
When a term is applied to one of its absolute borderline cases the result is a statement that
resists all attempts to settle whether it is true or false. No amount of conceptual analysis
or empirical inquiry can settle whether removing one head from a two headed man counts
as decapitating him. We could give the appearance of settling the matter by stipulating
that ‘decapitate’ means ‘remove a head’ (as opposed to ‘make headless’ or ‘remove the
head’ or ‘remove the most important head’). But that would amount to changing the topic
to an issue that merely sounds the same as decapitation.
Vagueness is standardly defined as the possession of borderline cases. For example, ‘tall’
is vague because a man who is 1.8 meters in height is neither clearly tall nor clearly non-
tall. No amount of conceptual analysis or empirical investigation can settle whether a 1.8
meter man is tall. Borderline cases are inquiry resistant.
Where does the tail of a snake begin? When posed as a rhetorical question, the speaker is
hinting that there is no definite answer. But the tail can be located by tracing down from
the snake’s rib cage. A false attribution of indeterminacy will lead to the premature
abandonment of inquiry. The risk of futile inquiry into questions that cannot be answered
must be balanced against the risk of abandoning questions that are actually answerable.
Inquiry resistance typically recurses. For in addition to the unclarity of the borderline
case, there is normally unclarity as to where the unclarity begins. Twilight governs times
that are borderline between day and night. But our uncertainty as to when twilight begins,
shows there must be borderline cases of borderline cases of ‘day’. Consequently,
‘borderline case’ has borderline cases. This higher order vagueness seems to show that
‘vague’ is vague (Hu 2017).
The vagueness of ‘vague’ would have two important consequences. First, Gottlob Frege
could no longer coherently characterize vague predicates as incoherent. For his accusation
uses ‘vague’. Frege’s ideal of precision is itself vague because ‘precise’ is the
complement of ‘vague’.
Second, the vagueness of ‘vague’ dooms efforts to avoid a sharp line between true and
false with a buffer zone that is neither true nor false. If the line is not drawn between the
true and the false, then it will be between the true and the intermediate state. Introducing
further intermediates just delays the inevitable.
This motivates second thoughts about second order vagueness. Instead of continuing to
treat higher order vagueness as an insight, several philosophers repudiate higher order
vagueness as an illusion (Wright 2010). They deny that there is an open-ended iteration
of borderline status. They find it telling that speakers do not go around talking about
borderline borderline cases and borderline borderline borderline cases and so forth
(Raffman 2005, 23).
Defenders of higher order vagueness say that ordinary speakers avoid iterating
‘borderline’ for the same reason they avoid iterating ‘million’ or ‘know’. The iterations
are confusing but perfectly meaningful. ‘Borderline’ behaves just like a vague predicate.
For instance, ‘borderline’ can be embedded in a sorites argument. Defenders of higher
order vagueness have also tried to clinch the case with particular specimens such as
borderline hermaphrodites (reasoning that these individuals are borderline borderline
males) (Sorensen 2010).
2. Comparison with Ambiguity and Generality
‘Tall’ is relative. A 1.8 meter pygmy is tall for a pygmy but a 1.8 meter Masai is not tall
for a Masai. Although relativization disambiguates, it does not eliminate borderline cases.
There are shorter pygmies who are borderline tall for a pygmy and taller Masai who are
borderline tall for a Masai. The direct bearers of vagueness are a word’s full
disambiguations such as ‘tall for an eighteenth century French man’. Words are only
vague indirectly, by virtue of having a sense that is vague. In contrast, an ambiguous word
bears its ambiguity directly—simply in virtue of having multiple meanings.
This contrast between vagueness and ambiguity is obscured by the fact that most words
are both vague and ambiguous. ‘Child’ is ambiguous between ‘offspring’ and ‘immature
offspring’. The latter reading of ‘child’ is vague because there are borderline cases of
immature offspring. The contrast is further complicated by the fact that most words are
also general. For instance, ‘child’ covers both boys and girls.
Ambiguity and vagueness also contrast with respect to the speaker’s discretion. If a word
is ambiguous, the speaker can resolve the ambiguity without departing from literal usage.
For instance, he can declare that he meant ‘child’ to express the concept of an immature
offspring. If a word is vague, the speaker cannot resolve the borderline case. For instance,
the speaker cannot make ‘child’ literally mean anyone under eighteen just by intending
it. That concept is not, as it were, on the menu corresponding to ‘child’. He would be
understood as taking a special liberty with the term to suit a special purpose.
Acknowledging departure from ordinary usage would relieve him of the obligation to
defend the sharp cut-off.
When the movie director Alfred Hitchcock mused ‘All actors are children’ he was taking
liberties with clear negative cases of ‘child’ rather than its borderline cases. The aptness
of his generalization is not judged by its literal truth-value (because it is obviously untrue).
Likewise, we do not judge precisifications of borderline cases by their truth-values
(because they are obviously not ascertainable as true or false). We instead judge
precisifications by their simplicity, conservativeness, and fruitfulness. A precisification
that draws the line across the borderline cases conserves more paradigm usage than one
that draws the line across clear cases. But conservatism is just one desideratum among
many. Sometimes the best balance is achieved at the cost of turning former positive cases
into negative cases.
Once we shift from literal to figurative usage, we gain fictive control over our entire
vocabulary—not just vague words. When a travel agent says ‘France is a hexagon’, we
do not infer that she has committed the geometrical error of classifying France as a six
sided polygon. We instead interpret the travel agent as speaking figuratively, as meaning
that France is shaped like a hexagon. Similarly, when the travel agent says ‘Reno is the
biggest little city’, we do not interpret her as overlooking the vagueness of ‘little city’.
Just as she uses the obvious falsehood of ‘France is a hexagon’ to signal a metaphor, she
uses the obvious indeterminacy of ‘Reno is the biggest little city’ to signal hyperbole.
Given that speakers lack any literal discretion over vague terms, we ought not to chide
them for indecisiveness. Where there is no decision to be made, there is no scope for vice.
Speakers would have literal discretion if statements applying a predicate to its borderline
cases were just permissible variations in linguistic usage. For instance, Crispin Wright
and Stewart Shapiro say a competent speaker can faultlessly classify the borderline case
as a positive instance while another competent speaker can faultlessly classify the case as
a negative instance.
For the sake of comparison, consider discretion between alternative spellings. Professor
Letterman uses ‘judgment’ instead of ‘judgement’ because he wants to promote the
principle that a silent E signals a long vowel. He still has fond memories of Tom Lehrer’s
1971 children’s song “Silent E”:
Who can turn a can into a cane?
Who can turn a pan into a pane?
It’s not too hard to see,
It’s Silent E.
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