Vagueness and Semantic Methodology

Two salient and appealing claims in Diana Raffman’s Unruly Words are that sorites-inducing vagueness is marked by a distinction between permissible and mandatory application, a distinction that is irrelevant to non-vague words; and that the notion of a borderline case (more exactly, of a soritical borderline case) should be characterized, at bottom, in terms of two contrary predicates (meeting certain other conditions) and not in terms of one predicate alone, or a predicate and its negation. This claim, which she calls “the incompatibilist analysis of borderline cases” (38), tells us, for example, that, at a fundamental level, we should not speak of a borderline case for “red” but instead of a borderline case for a pair like “red”[“orange”]. The analysis leads Raffman to say that borderline cases for a pair φ[φ*] are neither φ nor φ*. In that case, one might wonder how it could be, as she says, permissible to apply φ to a borderline case, and also permissible to apply its contrary φ*. It seems we need a conception of permissibility according to which it is permissible to say something false.