Soames argues that higher-order vagueness isn't as mysterious as it is commonly taken to be. What is the best way to express this?...What is interesting from my point of view is the suggestion that higher-order vagueness really isn't the same kind of thing as first-order vagueness. The picture is this. Take first-order vagueness to consist of a truth-value gap which trifurcates the sorites continuum. The extension of F consists in those things to which the application of "F" is mandated by world + linguistic tradition. The anti-extension of F consists in those things to which the non-application of "F" [= application of "not F"] is similarly mandated by world + linguistic tradition. In between the extension and the antiextension is the undefined region.
Why, now, should we expect that the border between e.g. the extension and the undefined region to be vague? The undefined region is a region where we may apply "F", but we don't have to---it is the zone where we exercise our discretion as competent language-users. The exercise of this discretion is something akin to the exercise of a right in the linguistic community. [The exercise of this right is identified with contextualism, though I'm not sure why.] It is reasonable that we are not highly sensitive to the place where our the external mandate peters out and our internal discretion kicks in---after all, as the first-order analysis shows, this is not the difference between applying the predicate truly and applying the predicate falsely. To the latter difference, the difference in truth-values, we must be highly sensitive. To the difference as Soames conceives it, we need not be highly sensitive.
If we accept Soames's argument that higher-order vagueness isn't the same kind of thing as first-order vagueness, the inevitable appearance higher-order vagueness makes as we theorize about first-order vagueness is not devastating---it is not a true "revenge paradox" in the sense that exposes our theorizing as un-explanatory.
Soames's analysis is a soup of different approaches to vagueness; it seems like his account of higher-order vagueness is a kind of epistemicism. This raises a general question about the usefulness of mixed approaches. It would be unsatisfying to veer wildly between different approaches to vagueness to deal with first-, second- and etc.-order vagueness, since there is a feeling that we are dealing with the same thing; it will look terribly much like trying everything because nothing works.
We can impose a bit of order, though, by attending to the phenomena. And it does seem like epistemicism is a useful way to tackle higher-order vagueness: this is a general feature of the fact that "determinately" and "definitely" are much more terms of art than "blue" and "bald." MacFarlane points this out in the course of advocating fuzzy epistemicism--he applies degrees to order-0 predicates like "bald" and epistemicism to "determinately". Soames appears to be doing the same thing, except with good old gappy logic at the order-0 level. To round out the trio, Heck ("Semantic Accounts of Vagueness") makes the same point in defending supervaluations*.
So should we deny that first-order and higher-order vagueness are the same kind of thing--or do mixed approaches merely generate an illusion of progress? McGee and McLaughlin seem to assume it is more or less the same kind of thing, when they relates the paradoxes generated by "determinately" to the paradoxes generated by truth-predicates:
"It is hardly surprising that there should be paradoxes here [in considering the iterated 'determinately' operator.] 'Determinately' is an ordinary English word, but it is being employed here in a specialized technical usage. Questions of higher-order vagueness arise when we try to use the technical term 'determinately' to characterize the technical term 'determinately.' Whatever we say to describe the usage of the word will be part of the usage we are trying to describe. We get the semantic paradoxes when we try to apply the predicate 'true' to sentences containing the predicate 'true.' We evade the liar paradox and Montague's paradox by replacing the adjective 'true' by the adverbial operator 'determinately', but now we get paradoxes of higher-order vagueness, which arise when we apply the 'determinately' operator to sentences that contain the 'determinately' operator."
(`Determinate Truth,' 26-27)
*"The more important point is that this argument [revenge on the supervaluationist]--like most of the discussions of higher-order vagueness in the extant literature, including my own previous discussions--assumes that the boundary between the heaps and the things on the borderline between the heaps and the non-heaps is not just seemingly vague but really vague, that is, vague in the same sense that the [original boundary] is vague...That can be denied, and I hereby deny it...Of course, not being in possession of the [Philosophers'] Grail, we have little idea where the boundary lies. But that isn't vagueness. It's just ignorance." (124)
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S. Soames, "Higher-order Vagueness for Partially Defined Predicates" in Beall, ed., Liars and Heaps.
R. G. Heck Jr., "Semantic Accounts of Vagueness" in Beall, ed., Liars and Heaps.
J. MacFarlane, "Fuzzy Epistemicism", johnmacfarlane.net. [also in Dietz and Moruzzi, eds., Cuts and Clouds.]
McGee and McLaughlin, "Determinate Truth", forthcoming.
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