Vagueness and Non-Indexical Contextualism

Abstract

Contextualism concerning vagueness (hereafter ‘CV’) is a popular response to the puzzle of vagueness. 1 The purpose of this chapter is to highlight some of the most basic components of CV, and to show that it is crucial to distinguish between two types of context-sensitivity in order to evaluate CV properly. In Section 2, we sketch a generic form of CV. In Section 3, we distinguish between Indexical and Non-indexical context-sensitivity and two corresponding versions of CV. 2 In Section 4, we discuss the extent to which various forms of ‘blindness’ are problematic for these two versions of CV. Non-indexical CV is found to fare better than Indexical CV in this respect. In Section 5 we address a challenge posed by Keefe (2007) to the effect that CV entails that any speech report of what has been said by a particular vague utterance, where the context of utterance and the reporting context are relevantly different, will almost always be inaccurate. While this challenge is prima facie effective against Indexical CV it proves to be less effective against Non-Indexical CV. 3 These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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