Precise entities but irredeemably vague concepts?

Abstract

Various arguments have recently been put forward to support the existence of vague or fuzzy objects. Nevertheless, the only possibly compelling argument would support, not the existence of vague objects, but indeterminately existing objects. I argue for the non-existence of any vague entities - either particulars or properties - in the mind-independent world. Even so, many philosophers have claimed that to reduce vagueness to semantics is of no avail, since linguistic vagueness betrays semantic incoherence and this is no less a problem than is ontological incoherence. After spelling out why there are fewer essentially vague concepts than usually thought, I claim that only the linguistic competence of the whole speaking community for each word can draw the sharp boundaries for its concept, even if these are unknowable in practice and still leave a precise range of indetermination. This could explain both the existence of boundaries and our non-removable ignorance of them, fulfilling the intuitions of the epistemic theory of vagueness with the supervaluationist's indeterminacy.