Vagaries about Vagueness

Abstract This chapter distinguishes two approaches to vagueness. The vagueness-in-language approach sees the world as exact, and all vagueness as inherent in our means of representing the world. By contrast, the vagueness-in-the-world approach sees the world itself as fuzzy, in the sense that for some things and some attributes of things, there is allegedly no fact of the matter whether those things possess or lack those attributes. The former approach is criticized on several grounds. The vagueness-in-language approach is either incoherent or collapses into vagueness-in-the-world. A recent objection to direct-reference theory, based upon the criticized approach, is shown to be fundamentally mistaken.