Abstract

Ithank the commenters for their insightful remarks, from which I have learned much. In my article, I sought to explain psychiatric vagueness, which arises in borderline cases where there is no fact of the matter as to whether a diagnosis rightly can be said to apply.1 I argued “if psychiatric vagueness exists, then some of it is at least partially semantic”. A semantic account holds that vague utterances express different propositions since small gaps in how linguistic communities apply terms modify their referents, making their precise extension indeterminate.2 On my view, this best accommodates intuitions about the nature of conditions and explains historical changes in the application of...