Abstract

Field (2000) claims that both inflationists and deflationists can and should accept the existence of linguistic indeterminacy in their own language. This paper shows that inflationists and deflationists consider the nature of indeterminacy quite differently; in particular, deflationists’ notion of indeterminacy lacks the kind of objectivity inflationists’ notion has; as a result, while both inflationists and deflationists can and should accept the existence of manifest indeterminacy such as vagueness, only inflationists can accept the existence of hidden indeterminacy such as the yet–to–be–discovered indeterminacy thought to be involved in terms of our current scientific theories. The paper also considers the question how well deflationists can do without hidden indeterminacy.