[FIRST PARAGRAPHS]
Is vagueness a feature of the world or merely of our representations
of the world? Of course, one might respond to this question by asserting
that insofar as our knowledge of the world is mediated by our
representations of it, any attribution of vagueness must attach to the latter.
However, this is to trivialize the issue: even granted the point that all
knowledge is representational, the question can be re-posed by asking
whether vague features of our representations are ultimately eliminable or
not. It is the answer to this question which distinguishes those who believe
that vagueness is essentially epistemic from those who believe that it is,
equally essentially, ontic. The eliminability of vague features according to
the epistemic view can be expressed in terms of the supervenience of
‘vaguely described facts’ on ‘precisely describable facts’:
If two possible situations are alike as precisely described in terms of
physical measurements, for example, then they are alike as vaguely
described with words like ‘thin’. It may therefore be concluded that the facts
themselves are not vague, for all the facts supervene on precisely
describable facts. (Williamson 1994, p. 248; see also pp. 201-
204)
It is the putative vagueness of certain identity statements in
particular that has been the central focus of claims that there is vagueness
‘in’ the world (Parfit 1984, pp. 238-241; Kripke 1972, p. 345 n. 18). Thus,
it may be vague as to who is identical to whom after a brain-swap, to give
a much discussed example. Such claims have been dealt a forceful blow
by the famous Evans-Salmon argument which runs as follows: suppose for
reductio that it is indeterminate whether a = b. Then b definitely possesses
the property that it is indeterminate whether it is identical with a, but a
definitely does not possess this property since it is surely not
indeterminate whether a=a. Therefore, by Leibniz’s Law, it cannot be the
case that a=b and so the identity cannot be indeterminate (Evans 1978;
Salmon 1982)
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