Vagueness and Thought

Vagueness is the study of concepts that admit borderline cases. The property of being tall is vague because there are people who are neither definitely tall, nor definitely not tall. The epistemology of vagueness concerns the sorts of attitudes we ought to have towards propositions we know to be borderline. Andrew Bacon undertakes a comprehensive investigation into the epistemology of vagueness, leveraging the results into a novel theory of vagueness. In contrast to many competing accounts, vagueness is seen as a feature of propositions, rather than items of language, and the vagueness of a proposition is explicated in terms of its role in thought. Bacon gives illuminating treatments of a range of topics concerning the relation of vagueness to evidence, knowledge, probability theory, decision theory, and modality. He suggests that some familiar philosophical notions – including the concept of a fundamental proposition, a possible world, and a precisification – need to be revised.