The Possibility of Vagueness
Kit Fine · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2020
We previously stated an impossibility result and suggested that the standard approaches to vagueness were incapable of providing a satisfactory response to the result. This chapter considers how a more satisfactory response to the result might proceed. This will call for a radical revision in our general understanding of vagueness and in how its logic has usually been conceived. It will be argued that the indeterminacy characteristic of vagueness can be conceived in purely logical terms without the need for any specific vagueness-theoretic vocabulary. The resulting notion of indeterminacy is seen to be global in character in that it makes sense to say that there is indeterminacy over a range of cases but not that there is indeterminacy in a single case; and a semantics for the resulting theory, in terms of the compatibility of uses, is then developed.