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WHY THE VAGUENESS PARADOX IS AMAZING

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 September 2018

Bryan Frances
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Abstract

One of the hardest problems in philosophy, one that has been around for over two thousand years without generating any significant consensus on its solution, involves the concept of vagueness: a word or concept that doesn't have a perfectly precise meaning. There is an argument that seems to show that the word or concept simply must have a perfectly precise meaning, as violently counterintuitive as that is. Unfortunately, the argument is usually so compressed that it is difficult to see why exactly the problem is so hard to solve. In this article I attempt to explain just why it is that the problem – the sorites paradox – is so intractable.

Type
Research Article
Information
Think , Volume 17 , Issue 50 , Autumn 2018 , pp. 27 - 38
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2018 

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References

Horgan, T. (1994) ‘Robust Vagueness and the Forced-March Sorites Paradox’, Philosophical Perspectives, Logic and Language 8: 159–88.Google Scholar
Priest, G. (2003) ‘A Site for Sorites’, in Beall, J. C. (ed.), Liars and Heaps: New Essays on Paradox (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2003), 24–38.Google Scholar
Williamson, T. (1994) Vagueness (London: Routledge).Google Scholar