Saying More (or Less) than One Thing

In a paper called Definiteness and Knowability, Timothy Williamson investigates the question of whether one must accept that vagueness is an epistemic phenomenon if one adopts classical logic and a disquotational principle for truth. Some have thought that one must not, and have argued that classical logic and the disquotational principle can be preserved without accepting that vagueness is an epistemic phenomenon. Williamson’s paper, however, finds ‘no plausible way of substantiating that possibility’. Its moral is that ‘either classical logic fails, or the disquotational principle does, or vagueness is an epistemic phenomenon’. The moral of this paper, on the contrary, is that there is a plausible way of substantiating that possibility. The plausible way in question looks like a view that Williamson dismisses at the beginning of his paper, and that others regard as unworthy of serious consideration. The view is that when the ascription of truth or falsity to a sentence is affected by unclarity, there is no such thing as what the sentence says.