Abstract
One of the challenges that any theorist of vagueness faces is to account for
there being two kinds of disagreement over vague predicates like “tall” and “rich”:
canonical disagreements concerning clear cases and faultless disagreements concerning
borderline cases. I’ll argue that one needs to maintain that the illocutionary force of
borderline utterances is different from that of clear utterances. Whereas the latter might
be correct assertions, the former should be assertives weaker than assertions, since they
express only a weak belief of the speaker. The degree of commitment to the truth of
what is said in a borderline utterance is lower and neither speaker of two opposing
verdicts makes a mistake.