ROBUST VAGUENESS AND THE FORCED-MARCH SORITES PARADOX

The ancients attributed both the sorites paradox and the liar paradox to Eubulides, a member of the Megarian school and a contemporary of Aristotle. 1 Yet even though the two paradoxes have been known equally long, the liar has received far more attention than the sorites in philosophy and in logic, both historically and in our own time.2 The sorites, like Rodney Dangerfield, gets no respect-not much, anyway. Historically, this neglect perhaps has something to do with the tendency to treat Euclidean mathematics, that great paradigm of precision, as a model for human knowledge generally. This tradition still exerts a powerful influence today, largely via the legacy of logical positivism.3 And in recent times, the relative neglect of the sorites paradox probably also reflects the recently widespread assumption that interesting human concepts have precise necessary and sufficient conditions, articulable via "conceptual analysis." But whatever the reasons might be why the sorites paradox has been neglected and underappreciated, it is time for that to change. Indeed, I think this change is probably inevitable, now that philosophers are widely coming to recognize that most human concepts are not susceptible to the kind of conceptual analysis envisioned in the heyday of High Church analytic philosophy. As we move into the post-analytic era, we must confront the fact that concepts are usually vague. Wherever there is vagueness, there looms the sorites. My primary purpose in this paper is to urge a new philosophical respect for the sorites paradox. In my view the paradox is much more difficult, much more philosophically deep, and much more fraught with import for metaphysics, semantics, and logic than is generally appreciated. I will explain why I think so, and I will advance some specific positive proposals along the way. In first the half of the paper (Sections 1-3), I take for granted that vagueness is a genuine and intelligible phenomenon, and that a proper understanding of it

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