Sorites paradoxes and the semantics of vagueness
Michael Tye · The MIT Press eBooks · 1997
via a million applications of modus ponens and universal instantiation. To treat this line of reasoning as a reductio of the denial of (1) is to concede that 'bald' is not vague, and hence, in the general case, to concede that no predicates are vague. This conclusion is, of course, itself paradoxical. What, then, has gone wrong? In this paper I want to present a novel semantics of vagueness which is, I maintain, invulnerable to Sorites Paradoxes such as the one above. I shall begin by briefly sketching and criticizing two well known alternative semantics. The failure of these semantics is, I believe, instructive.