Epistemicism

What differentiates epistemicism from semantic indeterminacy or metaphysical indeterminacy is, as the name suggests, the cause of indeterminacy: our epistemic ability. What makes epistemicism unique from other positions is that our ignorance does not result from something else, such as world or language. Our ignorance results from our epistemic limitations.

Endorsing epistemicism, Timothy Williamson (1994: 195, 1995) thinks that “determinately” should be treated as equivalent to “knowably.” Indeterminate truth is simply unknowable truth. Epistemic indeterminacy is ignorance about a fully

determinate, factual matter.88 _{Here is an example. There is nothing indeterminate}

about the world. When people are lined up from tall to not tall, there are no borderline cases of being tall or not tall. Even if the difference between two people is 0.1 cm or 0.01 cm, it does not matter. If being tall starts from 170 cm, then a person who is 169.99 cm is not tall. She must be 170 cm in order to be tall. Even though we do not know from what centimetre people start being tall, it is determinate that there is a height where people start being tall.

Then according to epistemicism, “Hana is tall” must be either true or false. Not deviating from classical logic, epistemicism remains faithfully to the principle of bivalence: “In cases of unclarity, statements remain true or false, but speakers of the language have no way of knowing which” (Williamson 1994: 3). Even though there

88 _{Some might be happy to say that Williamson clearly says that language is determinate. According to} Williamson, meaning is use. We have been using ‘tall’, for example, in a certain way over the years, but there is no possible way to track down the use in the past. Williamson (1994: 206) says, “Although meaning may supervene on use, there is no algorithm for calculating the former from the latter.” Since it is not possible to know how ‘tall’ has been used in the past, we do not know its application conditions.

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is a clear cut-off point between a person who is tall and who is not tall, we just do not

know how or where the predicate’s extensions fall.89 _{Why do we not know where the}

precise cut-off point lies? According to Williamson, we do not know whether “Hana is tall” because we cannot keep track of how ‘tall’ has been used through time. If the overall language usage pattern of ‘tall’ had been slightly shifted, the cut-off point of ‘tall’ would have changed.

Epistemicism is often met with incredulous stare because of its very unintuitive nature. It is unintuitive to think that there is a cut-off point for every vague predicate. However, I take epistemicism seriously in my thesis because

the epistemic view implies a form of realism, that even the truth about the boundaries of our concepts can outrun our capacity to know it. To deny the epistemic view of vagueness is therefore to impose limits on realism; to assert it is to endorse realism in a thoroughgoing form. (Williamson 1994: 4)

Epistemicism is, from the start, true to classical logic. This feature of epistemicism should be worth emphasizing because it is quite easy to find philosophers using non- classical logic to explain metaphysical indeterminacy or semantic indeterminacy. As I have argued that moral realists should, by default, accept classical logic, it is common that the realists find epistemicism the most appealing if they want to explain any kind of indeterminacy. The law of excluded middle and the law of bivalence are preserved for every moral sentence.

This is how moral realists would explain moral indeterminacy if they accept epistemicism. If there is predicate-indeterminacy, an epistemicist would say that a term definitely refers to a moral property, but we do not know and cannot know what that property is. If there is sentence-indeterminacy, an epistemicist would say that we do not know and cannot know what state of affairs the sentence represents. Soriticality never ends up in a paradox because there is a clear cut-off point. We just do not know and cannot know where the cut-off point is.

89 _{These are called ‘blindspots’, according to Sorensen (1988). Even if we had all the evidence about Hana’s height} and everyone else’s height in the world, we cannot know where the cut-off point of ‘tall’ lies.

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Wedgwood (2018) endorses such a view. He is “unpersuaded of the case that there is any such thing as moral vagueness” because there is always a sharp cut-off point in the moral soritical series. Taking all ethical notions to be fundamentally comparative, Wedgwood thinks that there is no vagueness or indeterminacy in “better than” or “worse than” relations. This is his analogy: let’s imagine ourselves holding different weights in our hands. We might not be able to tell which weight is heavier than the other if one (Mass 1) weighs 5 kg and the other (Mass 2) weighs 5.01

kg. However, there is no indeterminacy. Mass 1 is weightier than Mass 2.90 _{We just}

cannot always know that Mass 1 is weightier Mass 2 because of our limited powers of measurement. Just as comparing two weights are never vague, comparing ethical or normative concepts are never vague either. There is no indeterminacy in “Φ-ing is better than Ψ-ing” or “‘Reason 1 is weightier than Reason 2”. We just do not know whether it is true or not because our epistemic ability to know all the details is limited.