Is VaguenessSui Generis?

Indeterminacy and normative silence

“…The simpler thesis is incompatible with many views of indeterminacy that have been offered (e.g. Field 2000, Schiffer 2003, Barnett 2009, Smith:2010)---but they predict something much stronger than mere ignorance and they count as strategies of type (A) rather than (B). Connectedly, someone endorsing the mere ignorance view, unless they go all the way to epistemicism, will have to explain why there's any point in speaking of indeterminacy in the first place, if the information it conveys is solely that one is ignorant of the matter in question (compare Williamson 1994, ch.5).…”

Human Foreknowledge

“…The argument -and in fact the principle of unidirectionality itself -might fail, unless we assume in the background that the only relevant source of indeterminacy is the truth status of the relevant propositions. Some philosophers working on vagueness and paradox (Dorr, 2003;Barnett, 2009;Caie, 2012) allow that one might sometimes be in a state of indeterminate belief. Suppose one can be in a state of indeterminate belief towards the proposition that Linne will be happy (𝐀 1 ) and in a state of indeterminate belief towards the proposition that she will be sad (𝐀 2 ).…”

Williams on Supervaluationism and Logical Revisionism

“…For that identification is motivated by the desire to avoid bivalence; unless borderline cases fall down a truth-value gap, it is entirely mysterious why a non-bivalent semantics would be desirable. This analysis of borderline status naturally extends to an explanation of borderline ignorance: since knowledge implies truth, if p is borderline (neither true nor false), it cannot be known whether p. 2 Thus the importance that D provide "an object-language reflection 1 Some deny that any analysis of borderline status is possible (Barnett, 2009). I take it that the lack of explanatory work for the concepts of definiteness and of borderline status outside of vagueness counts strongly against these views.…”