Stephen Schiffer

When I was invited to participate in this symposium, I welcomed what I thought would be the opportunity to apply my views about the semantics and logic of vague language to the real-life problems of vagueness legal theorists worry about. I confess to having formed my ambition without a very clear sense of what jurisprudential problems might be illuminated by general theories of vagueness. To be sure, I was able to guess that a symposium on Vagueness and Law must have something to do with the dilemmas courts face when it is indeterminate how a legal dispute should be resolved. What I had not thought through was how philosophers like myself might help to illuminate those dilemmas by bringing to bear on them their own logico-semantical theories of vagueness. This was unfortunate because, having done a bit of homework, I have reached the conclusion that philosophical theories of vagueness, even if true, have nothing to offer jurisprudential concerns about vagueness. Once she is reminded of certain platitudes about vagueness, the legal theorist needs no further help from philosophers of language and logic. Let’s see why this is so

The proper statement and assessment of Russell's theory depends on one's semantic presuppositions. A semantic framework is provided, and Russell's theory formulated in terms of it. Referential uses of descriptions raise familiar problems for the theory, to which there are, at the most general level of abstraction, two possible Russellian responses. Both are considered, and both found wanting. The paper ends with a brief consideration of what the correct positive theory of definite descriptions might be, if it is not the Russellian theory.

There are two things we must know in order to know what vagueness is. We must know what kinds of things can be vague. Evidently, predicate and sentence types can be vague, but what about tokens of those types? What about statements and other speech acts? What about abstract entities such as properties and propositions? And what about names and the boundaries of physical objects? Then, of course, for each kind of thing that can be vague, we must know in what vagueness for that kind consists. Needless to say, that there are these two questions doesn’t mean that we should try to answer the first before trying to answer the second.