Let’s suppose that we accept that there could be no correct semantics for vague terms for the reasons I gave in the previous chapter. Any theorist about vagueness taking themselves to be aiming to properly capture the phenomenon of vagueness might see
this as a challenge to their theory as a whole (whatever it might be). By saying that there are no correct semantics for vague terms, am I saying that theorists of vagueness who are trying to give such a correct semantics need to go back to the drawing board (or give up altogether)? Not necessarily. In making this claim, I intend to make more of a methodological point rather than to criticise any particular set of theories, or to say that we should stop theorising about vagueness altogether. Let’s take a look at whether it’s possible to maintain this distance from ruling out existing theories alto-gether.
1.1 Impossibility Objection
We can start with the most extreme end of the possible revisionary implications of the claim that I’m putting forward. If there are no correct semantics for vague terms, does that mean that there could be no vague terms?1 If we think of vagueness as a semantic phenomenon, and we also take there to be no correct semantics for vague terms, how can we make sense of there being vagueness at all?
Well, it’s straightforward enough to show at least one sense in which vagueness and vague terms are not impossible (or don’t in themselves embody any contradic-tions), even if there is no correct semantics for vague terms. Think again about the claim I made in chapter 4 in characterising vagueness: that when an expression is
1Horgan (in his 2010) reconstructs a similar objection to his view (defended in, for example, his 1995, 1998, 2000 and 2006) along these lines from Williamson (citing his 2002). Horgan’s view involves the claim that vague terms are in some way inherently inconsistent, and he takes the objection posed by Williamson to be that, since there can be no true contradictions, vagueness must be impossible on his view (2010, 75). Now what Williamson actually says doesn’t quite amount to this — the closest he comes to this claim is in saying that Horgan’s view might appear to be that ‘vague discourse satisfies semantic standards that are mutually inconsistent’ (my emphasis), but that ‘[s]ince this claim involves an immediate inconsistency, it is presumably not what Horgan intends’ (2002, 274), and in going on to suggest that there is some ambiguity about whether Horgan really is (or should be) claiming that vague discourse satisfies those standards. The impossibility objection can be read from this by considering why Horgan would not intend to say that vague discourse satisfies mutually inconsistent standards if that involved an immediate inconsistency: presumably the reason Williamson has in mind is that contradictions cannot possibly be true, and so for there to be vagueness something impossible would need to be the case.
vague, competent users of that expression won’t, consistently with each other (and themselves), judge a relevant set of cases in a way which divides them up into the ones to which it applies, those to which it doesn’t, and any others. Whether or not there could be a correct semantics for the expressions covered by this condition, it seems clear enough that some expressions could meet this condition. It therefore seems that there could still be vague expressions, even if there were no correct semantics for such expressions. What this highlights is just that vagueness should not be construed fun-damentally as a feature of the ‘meanings’ of certain expressions; instead, the vague-ness of expressions is, at root, a feature of the way they are ‘used’. Of course, on this view, an expression’s being vague has certain implications for what it means, and one key implication is that there is no correct semantics for that expression.
A potential objector could reply to this by saying that, in construing vagueness as a feature of the way expressions are used, rather than their meanings, I have only pushed the ‘impossibility’ objection back by a step, as I argued that when the use of those expressions have that feature, a correct semantics for those expressions would not divide all cases into those with top, bottom, and other, values (a claim which I made use of in arguing that there could be no correct semantics for vague terms). As such, they could argue that my characterisation of vague terms in terms of use still renders vagueness impossible, because the relevant feature of their use entails certain (impossible) features of its meaning. But this isn’t quite right: my argument is better construed as relying on the claim that, since competent use doesn’t stably divide up cases into ‘applies’, ‘doesn’t apply’ and ‘other’ when there’s vagueness, if there were a correct semantics for vague terms, it would likewise not divide up cases like that.
And that’s consistent with there being no correct semantics for vague terms at all.
In a different vein, they could also reply that, if I’m right in saying that the char-acterisation of vagueness that I offered in chapter 4 means that there’s no correct se-mantics for vague terms, then that’s just a reason to reject that characterisation: if
you’re convinced that there must be a correct semantics for vague terms, in offering my characterisation I’d essentially be trying to convince you that vagueness was im-possible. This wouldn’t get things right, either. It’s possible to accept my characterisa-tion and yet maintain that the semantics for vague terms do in fact divide all cases into
‘applies’, ‘doesn’t apply’, and ‘other’. The point that I made in chapter 5 is just that if the use and meaning of vague terms don’t ‘match up’ in this way, it’s mysterious how this happens. The question we’re left with is this: is it more plausible that the mean-ings of vague terms completely categorise all cases, despite use failing to outwardly reflect any such categorisation, or that there is no correct semantics for vague terms after all? Much of this chapter should lend greater plausibility to the latter option.
Before coming to the next ‘revisionary’ problem, it’s important to clarify that the view I’m putting forward is not that there is nothing correct to be said about the se-mantics of vague terms. Some obvious claims should obviously come out as true how-ever we construe the meaning of vague terms — that ‘someone who is 4ft tall isn’t tall’
should be deemed true (in most contexts), and that shorts are trousers should likewise be false. What’s more, as we’ll go on to see later, there are elements of vagueness that we can recover in the semantics that we settle on, such as giving an (at least partial) account of borderline cases. The point is just that if we tried to develop a semantics on which all features of vagueness in use are taken seriously and accounted for, we wouldn’t be successful.
1.2 Are Popular Theories of Vagueness Valuable?
Does the claim that there is no correct semantics for vague terms nonetheless mean that, since many popular theories of vagueness aim to correctly capture the phenome-non of vagueness, all of these theories are worthless since they’re all strictly speaking incorrect? The answer to this question must also be ‘no’. As I just noted, even if there
is no correct semantics for vague terms, there are still plenty of true things we can say about their meanings.
Still, there’s a tension here: if these theories really are trying to get at the correct semantics for vague terms, their defenders all seem to be doing something wrong (not-withstanding the ‘first-order’ ways in which they might be getting things wrong by each others’ lights). But we can construe this ‘something’ as big or small. We’ll now look from a very general perspective at how we can do some ‘damage control’, and at some ways in which we could make sense of any popular theory of vagueness that takes itself to be correctly capturing the semantics of vague terms, while retaining as much as possible of the general ‘shape’ of those theories.2