Epistemic absolutism holds that knowledge‐that is ungradable, while epistemic gradualism argues the opposite. This paper purports to remodel the gradualism/absolutism debate. The current model initiated by Stephen Hetherington fails to capture the genuine divergence between the two views, which makes the debate equivocal, and the gradualist side lacks appeal. I propose that the remodeled debate should focus on whether knowledge‐that is a ‘threshold concept’ or a ‘spectrum concept’. That is, whether there is a threshold distinguishing knowledge from non‐knowledge. The reconstructed (...) model enjoys significant advantages as it enables the debate to be more balanced and philosophically interesting. (shrink)

Scott Soames argues that consideration of the practice of legal judgement gives us good reason to favor the partial-definition/context-sensitive theory of vagueness against epistemicism. Despite the fact that the value of power-delegation through vagueness is evidenced in practice, Soames says, epistemicism cannot account for it theoretically, while the partial-definition/context-sensitive theory is capable of it. In this paper, I examine the two possible arguments against epistemicism that can be extracted from Soames’s account: (i) an argument based on unknown obligations, and (ii) (...) an argument based on power-delegation through vagueness. The first argument tries to convince us that, as based on epistemicism, the law has already decided the borderline cases, so that judges have obligatory decisions even in such cases: therefore epistemicism is inconsistent with the discretion of judges in borderline cases. I show that even if we sympathize with Soames’s intuitions concerning the legal practice, the argument he offers is not conclusive since it is either invalid, unsound, or paradoxical. The second argument holds that only the gaps which the partial-definition/context-sensitive theory predicts give judges the possibility of lawmaking in borderline cases. However, by categorizing the vague laws as imperfect laws, the judges can claim the right of lawmaking without any need to refer to gaps in the law. By neutralizing these arguments, I argue that epistemicism is able to explain the phenomena just as well as the partial-definition/context-sensitive theory. (shrink)