Organon F
Volume 33, February 2026, Issue 1, Pages 119–142
ISSN 2585-7150 (online)
Epistemicism about vagueness is the position that bivalence holds for every instance of a vague predicate, even if truth or falsity is unknowable in borderline cases. Epistemicism is accused of rejecting the tolerance intuition, and committing itself to sharp borderlines. Mainstream Epistemicists, like Williamson and Sorensen, accept these accusations as costs of their view. I argue instead that both are myths. First, I argue our intuitions support only generic, dense tolerance principles, which are non-paradoxical. Epistemicists can affirm these principles, without inferring any paradoxical principle, and so can embrace the tolerance intuition. Second, bivalence is perfectly compatible with the denial of sharp borderlines, provided that we model the extension of vague predicates as scattered stochastically and non-monotonically across a gradient, just as we should expect if meaning depends on use. My revisionary form of epistemicism better balances our intuitions about vagueness with the conservation of bivalence.
Borderline cases; continuous sorites; epistemicism; sorites; tolerance principle; vagueness.
Author
Jeffrey J. Watson
Affiliation
Arizona State University
Address
Arizona State University, School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies, 975 S Myrtle Ave., Mail Code 4302, Tempe, AZ 85287-4302, USA
Received
7 August 2025
Revised
2 December 2025
Accepted
8 December 2025
Publishers
Institute of Philosophy of the Slovak Academy of Sciences
Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences
APA
Watson, J.J. (2026). Vagueness: Two Myths. Organon F, 33(1), 119–142. https://doi.org/10.31577/orgf.2026.33305
Chicago
Watson, Jeffrey J. 2026. "Vagueness: Two Myths." Organon F 33 (1): 119–142. https://doi.org/10.31577/orgf.2026.33305
Harvard
Watson, J.J. (2026). Vagueness: Two Myths. Organon F, 33(1), pp. 119–142. https://doi.org/10.31577/orgf.2026.33305
© Jeffrey J. Watson
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