The Vagueness of ‘Vague’: Rejoinder to Hull

Is ‘vague’ vague? Aldrich (1937: 94) didn’t think so. Austin (1962: 126) did, and Sorensen (1985) offered a proof. Deas (1989) rejected the proof, but in (2003) I sided with Sorensen. Now Hull (2005) replies on behalf of Deas. Why so much fuss about a single word? One reason, I think, is that a lot depends on how we settle the question. For example, Frege (1903: §56) famously remarked that logic must be restricted to non-vague predicates. But if ‘vague’ is vague, then so is ‘non-vague’, hence the restriction is itself vague and, therefore, helpless. For another example, incoherence theorists such as Unger (1979) have claimed that vague terms have no clear instances, blocking the sorites paradox at the base step. If ‘vague’ is vague, however, then either it is a clear instance of itself, in which case the incoherentist claim is plainly false, or it has an empty extension, in which case the claim is vacuously true (there are no vague predicates) and the paradox strikes back. Finally, if ‘vague’ is vague, then—as Hyde (1994) has argued—vague predicates must suffer from the phenomenon of higher-order vagueness (at least some must, if Tye (1994) is right).1 So I agree with Hull: this is no small issue and we need to look at it closely. That ‘vague’ is vague is, on the face of it, a plausible thought. There are predicates, such as ‘small’, that are clearly vague and predicates, such as ‘less than 100’, that are clearly non-vague, but there are also predicates for which it seems unclear whether they are vague or not. Is there a precise moment at which a person ceases to be alive? Is there an exact moment at which a woman becomes a mother? In fact, it is not just predicates that can plausibly be classified as borderline cases of ‘vague’. ‘Everest’ is a vague name and ‘Wyoming’ isn’t. But what about ‘John’? Does it have a precise referent? One can construct an Unger-type sorites to show that it doesn’t: the removal of one body cell does not affect the identity of John but the removal of lots of body cells does. On the other hand, one may consider rejecting such a sorites in various ways, e.g., by setting a cut-off point on biological grounds. As