According to contextualism about vagueness, the content of a vague predicate is context sensitive. On this view, when item a is in the penumbra of the vague predicate ‘F’, speakers may utter ‘Fa’, or they may utter ‘not-Fa’, without contravening the literal meaning of ‘F’. Unlike its more popular variants, the version of contextualism I defend rejects the principle of tolerance, a principle according to which small differences should not affect the applicability of a vague predicate. My goal is to (...) show how such a rejection allows for a plausible treatment of higher-order vagueness, and for a dissolution of paradoxes of higher-order vagueness. (shrink)

This piece gives an overview of the supervaluationist theory of vagueness. According to that theory, a sentence is true if and only if it is true on all ways of making it precise. This yields borderline case predications that are neither true nor false, but yet classical logic is preserved almost entirely. The article presents the view and some of its merits and briefly compares it with other theories of vagueness. It raises issues about higher-order vagueness and the definitely operator (...) and about the supervaluationist's accounts of truth and validity. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: This paper argues that the so-called paradoxes of higher-order vagueness are the result of a confusion between higher-order vagueness and the distribution of the objects of a Sorites series into extensionally non-overlapping non-empty classes.

This paper shows that the following common assumption is false: that in modal-logical representations of higher-order vagueness, for there to be borderline cases to borderline cases ad infinitum, the number of possible distinct modalities in a modal system must be infinite. (Open access journal).

Most descriptions of higher-order vagueness in terms of traditional modal logic generate so-called higher-order vagueness paradoxes. The one that doesn't is problematic otherwise. Consequently, the present trend is toward more complex, non-standard theories. However, there is no need for this.In this paper I introduce a theory of higher-order vagueness that is paradox-free and can be expressed in the first-order extension of a normal modal system that is complete with respect to single-domain Kripke-frame semantics. This is the system QS4M+BF+FIN. It corresponds (...) to the class of transitive, reflexive and final frames. With borderlineness defined logically as usual, it then follows that something is borderline precisely when it is higher-order borderline, and that a predicate is vague precisely when it is higher-order vague.Like Williamson's, the theory proposed here has no clear borderline cases in Sorites sequences. I argue that objections that there must be clear borderline cases ensue from the confusion of two notions of borderlineness—one associated with genuine higher-order vagueness, the other employed to sort objects into categories—and that the higher-order vagueness paradoxes result from superimposing the second notion onto the first. Lastly, I address some further potential objections. (shrink)