Vague Properties
Stephen P. Schiffer · 2010
Abstract ‘Quandary’ labels a psychological state that is characteristic of taking a thing to be a borderline instance of a property. Q-Constraint is the claim that there need be nothing incorrect about being in Quandary. A truth-status theory of vague properties assigns a particular truth-status (e.g. being true or false, being neither true nor false) to the proposition that x is an instance of φ when x is a borderline instance of φ. This chapter argues that no truth-status theory is consistent with Q-Constraint and sketches a non-truth-status theory of vague properties that satisfies Q-Constraint. A crucial feature of the sketch is that vague properties are individuated in a way that affords us epistemic and linguistic access to them by the very use-practices that determine which vague properties words express.