Wright on Vagueness and Agnosticism

Abstract

According to the epistemic view, vagueness is a case of ignorance. Neither do we know of any given borderline statement that it is true, nor do we know of any such statement that it is false. We are ignorant of which truth-value any given borderline statement has. Some proponents of the epistemic viewthe epistemicists hold that we nonetheless know that there is something we thus are ignorant of: we know that borderline statements are either true or false, although we do not know which truth-value they have. If all borderline statements are either true or false, as epistemicists contend, then vague terms have sharp boundaries. Accordingly, epistemicists claim that we do know that vague terms have sharp boundaries, although we do not know where they lie. That vague terms have sharp boundaries follows from the application, to statements in which these terms occur, of classical logic and its attendant bivalent semantics. Epistemicism thus incorporates classicism as applied to vague discourse. Others who still think that vagueness is at bottom an epistemic phenomenon, object to the epistemicist claim that we know that borderline statements are either true or false. According to these thinkers, we are not only ignorant of which of the two truth-values, if any, borderline statements possess, we are also ignorant of whether they have a truthvalue which we thus are ignorant of. To hold such a view implies commitment to the claim that epistemicism has not been shown to be correct. Thus, it would appear that proponents of this view are obliged to counter epistemicist arguments for applying the principle of Bivalence to borderline statements. However, epistemicists typically do not produce any such arguments, but rather take the validity of classical logic and the adequacy of its bivalent semantics for granted. Thus, epistemicists conceive of their position as leaving room for what is considered to be an independently motivated logical theory to which no serious alternative has been proposed. They try to show that the phenomenon of