Replies to Part II Intuitionism and the Sorites

This chapter provides a reply to the chapters in Part II of this book. It looks at the philosophical challenges presented by vagueness. Philosophers of language from Frege on had been for the most part content to theorize in ways that ignored vagueness, or to focus on idealized languages in which there was none. And no one writing before 1970 seemed fully to have taken the measure of the awkwardness of the Sorites paradox, or the depth of its roots in our intuitive thinking about what kind of ability mastery of a language is. The chapter concludes that the intuitionistic approach, with its integral repudiation of any idea of vagueness as constituted in semantic facts that somehow underlie and explain the distinctive patterns of use of vague expressions, and its consequent commitment to liberalism about verdicts in the borderline region, does exactly that.