Vague, So Untrue

∗The authors formulated the main idea for this paper in 1996. Sider wrote a rst draft in the Spring of 2001 and presented talks at various places, some under the title “Vagueness, Ambiguity and the Application of Logic”. Braun and Sider revised the paper signi cantly during 2002–2004. We would like to thank the following for helpful comments: JC Beall, Jiri Benovsky, Sylvain Bromberger, Cian Dorr, Delia Graff, Hilary Greaves, John Hawthorne, Mark Heller, Benj Hellie, Hud Hudson, Jeff King, Karson Kovakovich, Sarah-Jane Leslie, Europa Malynicz, Ned Markosian, Gail Mauner, Vann McGee, Brian McLaughlin, Daniel Nolan, Teresa Robertson, Jennifer Saul, Roy Sorensen, Jason Stanley, Gabriel Uzquiano, Ryan Wasserman, Brian Weatherson, Timothy Williamson, anonymous referees, the participants in Tim Maudlin’s seminar on truth, and audiences at Alabama, Alberta, the ANU, Boise State, Calvin, the Creighton Club, UC Davis, Kentucky, Leeds, Massachusetts, Massey, M.I.T., Miami, the New Jersey Regional Association conference, Oxford, the PrincetonRutgers graduate student conference, Richmond, Southern Illinois at Edwardsville, Stockholm, Syracuse, Virginia, and Western Washington University. 1Frege (1903, section 56); see also Williamson (1994, section 2.2). The recent literature does contain some related views. Mark Heller’s view is somewhat like ours (1990, chapters 3 and 4). Peter Unger (1979a,b,c) claimed that vague sentences like ‘I exist’ are untrue, but his view was far more radical than ours (e.g.: “our existing expressions, at least by and large, fail to make any contact with whatever is there” (1979a, p. 249)). See also Dummett (1975) and Wheeler (1975, 1979). An interesting case is David Lewis. Mostly he seems to endorse standard supervaluationism, but some intriguing remarks sound closer to semantic nihilism: “Super-truth, with respect to a language interpreted in an imperfectly decisive way, replaces truth simpliciter as the goal of a cooperative speaker attempting to impart information” (1993, p. 29 — our boldface). Sorensen (2002) suggests that supervaluationists should reject the identi cation of supertruth with truth, and should hold that no sentence is true. Perhaps he has something like semantic nihilism in mind. Vann McGee and Brian McLaughlin (1995) also reject the identi cation, but unlike us, try to use supertruth to capture part of our ordinary notion of truth. Closest of all is the view presented by Kirk Ludwig and Greg Ray (2002). Like us, Ludwig and Ray say that vague sentences are untrue, and that vagueness does not require abandoning classical logic. But there are many differences between our theories, the most crucial of which stem from their (implausible, in our view) denial of vagueness in semantic vocabulary. Consequently, they do not develop a theory of ignoring, which is crucial to our account (section 1.2), nor do they address the worries that the view is self-defeating (section 1.4) and inexpressible (section 3.2).