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Full Idea
We can see Epistemicism [vagueness as ignorance] as a common and misguided tendency to identify a cause with its symptoms. We are unsure how to characterise vagueness, and identify it with the resulting ignorance, instead of explaining it.
Gist of Idea
Identifying vagueness with ignorance is the common mistake of confusing symptoms with cause
Source
Kit Fine (Vagueness: a global approach [2020], 1)
Book Ref
Fine,Kit: 'Vagueness: a global approach' [OUP 2020], p.16
A Reaction
Love it. This echoes my repeated plea in these reactions to stop identifying features of reality with the functions which embody them or the patterns they create. We need to explain them, and must dig deeper.
Related Idea
Idea 23543 We identify laws with regularities because we mistakenly identify causes with their symptoms [Fine,K]
| 12516 | Obscure simple ideas result from poor senses, brief impressions, or poor memory [Locke] |
| 12517 | Ideas are uncertain when they are unnamed, because too close to other ideas [Locke] |
| 23542 | Identifying vagueness with ignorance is the common mistake of confusing symptoms with cause [Fine,K] |
| 9044 | If someone is borderline tall, no further information is likely to resolve the question [Keefe/Smith] |
| 9048 | The simplest approach, that vagueness is just ignorance, retains classical logic and semantics [Keefe/Smith] |
| 9055 | The epistemic view of vagueness must explain why we don't know the predicate boundary [Keefe/Smith] |
| 6863 | Close to conceptual boundaries judgement is too unreliable to give knowledge [Williamson] |
| 21591 | Vagueness is epistemic. Statements are true or false, but we often don't know which [Williamson] |
| 21619 | If a heap has a real boundary, omniscient speakers would agree where it is [Williamson] |
| 21620 | The epistemic view says that the essence of vagueness is ignorance [Williamson] |
| 21622 | If there is a true borderline of which we are ignorant, this drives a wedge between meaning and use [Williamson] |
| 9120 | Vagueness in a concept is its indiscriminability from other possible concepts [Williamson] |
| 16226 | Epistemic vagueness seems right in the case of persons [Hawley] |
| 9116 | Vague words have hidden boundaries [Sorensen] |