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The Riddle of Vagueness

The Riddle of Vagueness

Selected Essays 1975–2020
C R I SP I N W R IG H T
With an Introduction by
R IC HA R D K I M B E R LY H E C K
1
1
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© Crispin Wright 2021
Introduction © Richard Kimberly Heck 2021
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First Edition published in 2021
Impression: 1
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Contents
Preface and Acknowledgements vii

Origins of the Essays xv
Introduction by Richard Kimberly Heck 1
1. On the Coherence of Vague Predicates 41
2. Language-Mastery and the Sorites Paradox 79
3. Hairier than Putnam Thought with Stephen Read 103
4. Further Reflections on the Sorites Paradox 107
5. Is Higher-Order Vagueness Coherent? 167
6. The Epistemic Conception of Vagueness 181
7. On Being in a Quandary: Relativism, Vagueness,
Logical Revisionism 209
8. Rosenkranz on Quandary, Vagueness, and Intuitionism 261
9. Vagueness: A Fifth Column Approach 271
10. Vagueness-Related Partial Belief and the Constitution of
Borderline Cases 293
11. ‘Wang’s Paradox’ 303
12. The Illusion of Higher-Order Vagueness 335
13. On the Characterization of Borderline Cases 367
14. Intuitionism and the Sorites Paradox 393
Appendix to Chapter 14 423
References 427
General Index 435
Index of Names 445
Preface and Acknowledgements
I started grappling with the philosophical challenges presented by vagueness

in the early 1970s. At that time, I think it fair to say, almost nothing of real
significance had been written on the topic since the contributions of Eubulides
of Megara.1 In the modern era, in particular, philosophers of language from
Frege on had been for the most part content to theorize in ways that margin-
alized vagueness, or to focus on idealized languages in which there was none.
No one writing before 1970 seemed fully to have taken the measure of the
awkwardness of the Sorites paradox,2 or the depth of its roots, as usually
formulated, in our intuitive thinking about what kind of ability mastery of a
language is.
My curiosity about the topic was originally piqued by conversations with
my friend the mathematician Aidan Sudbury and with Michael Dummett,
then my colleague at All Souls, who around that time was working on the
stunning lecture that he later published as ‘Wang’s Paradox’ (Dummett 1975).
My own interest initially stemmed from concerns in the philosophy of math-
ematics: I was drawn to the thought that the apparent open-endedness of the
extension of a vague predicate might provide a fruitful model for the manner
in which a finitist should think about the putatively infinite extension of
natural number, and that a correct logic of vagueness might accordingly be
appropriate for a finitist number theory. My subsequent paper ‘Strict Finitism’
(Wright 1982) was the upshot of my reflections in that direction. But while
thinking about finitism I became preoccupied with the Sorites paradox itself.
Dummett’s paper argued, inter alia, that vague expressions do indeed affect
natural language with inconsistency—that is, that the paradox shows that our
use of vague expressions is governed by rules that are actually inconsistent.
That struck me then as an incredible conclusion,3 but one that was neverthe-
less forced by a certain conception of the significance of the kind of theory of
meaning for a natural language to which philosophers of the time aspired, at
least in Oxford in the mid-1970s, in the throes of the then reverberating
1 An interesting study of the early history of the Sorites is Moline (1969).

2 An exception is Black (1937).
3 Others, of course, have endorsed Dummett’s response, notably Matti Eklund. A useful conspectus
of his views is Eklund (2019).
viii Preface and Acknowledgements
‘Davidsonic boom’. This conception is what I punningly dubbed the ‘govern-

ing view’—crudely, that understanding a natural language is, through and
through, a rule-governed competence. The idea, crudely, was that we are able
to parse a novel sentence by (in some sense) working out the conjoint implica-
tions of the rules of syntax relevant to its mode of construction and the
semantical rules governing its occurrent primitive expressions. My first two
chapters4 elaborate and critique that thought, and indeed my efforts to refine
it resurface in several places in this volume. But at that time I attempted no
specific resolution of the paradox other than, in this way, to try to undercut
one kind of motivation for (one form of) its major premise.
It was more than a decade before I felt that I had anything further to say
on the issues. By then Hilary Putnam (1983) had suggested that a resort to
intuitionist rather than classical logic might contribute to a solution. After
some skirmishing (Wright (1987a, this volume, Chapter 4), I became con-
vinced that there might be something to this. The other development in my
thinking at that time was the realization that we need to distinguish a
variety of Sorites paradoxes, differing in the form taken by their major
premises, the various lines of motivation for those premises, and even—in
recognition of the so-called Forced March Sorites—in whether they involve
explicit inference from premises at all (Wright 1987a, this volume,
Chapter 4). I was, however, still thinking of vagueness as essentially a phe-
nomenon of semantics—as some kind of deficiency, or partiality, of content,
or lack of instruction from s emantic rules—and it was only after trying to
come to terms with Timothy Williamson’s brilliant book (1994, critiqued in
this volume, Chapter 6) in the mid-1990s that a different way of thinking
about the matter began to dawn on me. In essentials, Williamson’s
‘Epistemicism’ grafts together two thoughts: a classical, bivalent metaphys-
ics of indicative content coupled with a view of the vagueness of a predicate
as essentially an epiphenomenon of our difficulty in judging its application
in the area close to the sharp ‘cut-off ’ required by the first thought. It now
occurred to me that dispensing with the first thought while developing the
second (shorn, therefore, of the presupposition of sharp cut-offs) might
provide the motivation for a thoroughgoing intuitionistic treatment of the
4 ‘On the Coherence of Vague Predicates’ (this volume, Chapter 1) was eventually published in the
same volume of Synthese as ‘Wang’s Paradox’. The volume also included Kit Fine’s ‘Vagueness, Truth
and Logic’ (Fine 1975), and proved to be key in launching the intense discussion of vagueness and the
Sorites, now into its fifth decade, that has followed since. ‘Language-Mastery and the Sorites Paradox’
(1976, this volume, Chapter 2) was published in Gareth Evans’s and John McDowell’s influential
edited anthology Truth and Meaning, exploring the issues raised by Davidson’s proposal for
meaning-theory.
Preface and Acknowledgements ix
topic—a treatment broadly modelled on the Mathematical Intuitionists’

treatment of classical number theory and analysis—providing both for a
satisfying deconstruction of the plausibility of the major premises in Sorites
paradoxes, and for a well-motivated framework in which those premises
can be denied without the essentially and regrettably superstitious resort to
sharp cut-offs. That remains my view.
But it takes a bit of working out. My first explicit foray in the intuitionistic
direction was ‘On Being in a Quandary’ (Wright 2001b, this volume, Chapter 7;
also published in Philosopher’s Annual, 24). The paper was initially rejected by
Mind with a comment by the referee that it ‘contained no discernible line of
argument’. I requested the editor at the time, Mark Sainsbury, to determine
whether that should be the final view of the journal. Mark solicited other
opinions and, gratifyingly, subsequently saw fit to publish. The intuitionistic
project underwent further motivation and development in a paper I wrote for
the memorable Liars and Heaps conference organized by Jc Beall and Michael
Glanzberg at the University of Connecticut in 2002 (Wright 2003c, this vol-
ume, Chapter 9). A further opportunity for a more complete statement of it
was provided by the invitation to contribute to the Library of Living
Philosophers volume for Michael Dummett that was published in 2007
(Wright 2007, this volume, Chapter 11).
Michael’s graceful but incredulous reaction to my proposal in his Reply5—
echoed, at least in point of incredulity, by Ian Rumfitt6—spurred me into
thinking further about the question, what kind of semantics might be appro-
priate for a language containing vague expressions and the basic logical
resources involved in the derivation of Sorites paradoxes, if the needed intu
itionistic/logical distinctions, especially the potential contrast between the
5 ‘I am left, then, with admiration for the beautiful solution of the Sorites paradox advocated by
Crispin Wright, clouded by a persistent doubt whether it is correct . . . I do not say that Wright’s pro-
posed solution of the Sorites is wrong; I say only that we need a more far-going explanation than
Wright has given us of why intuitionistic logic is the right logic for statements containing vague
expressions before we can acknowledge it as correct. It is not enough to show that the Sorites paradox
can be evaded by the use of intuitionistic logic: what is needed is a theory of meaning, or at least a
semantics, for sentences containing vague expressions that shows why intuitionistic logic is appropri-
ate for them rather than any other logic . . . If Crispin Wright is to persuade us that he has the true
solution to the Sorites paradox, he must give a more convincing justification of the use of intuitionistic
logic for statements containing vague expressions: a justification namely, that does not appeal only to
the ability of that logic to resist the Sorites slide into contradiction. We need a justification that would
satisfy someone who was puzzled about vagueness but had never heard of the Sorites: a justification
that would sketch a convincing semantics for sentences involving vague expressions’ (Dummett 2007,
pp. 453–4).
6 Rumfitt does indeed proceed to offer an intricate semantics for vagueness that has some prospect
for validating intuitionist logic (Rumfitt 2015, pp. 227ff). I have expressed reservations about its fit-
ness for the philosophical purpose elsewhere (Wright 2020, pp. 378ff).
x Preface and Acknowledgements
acceptability conditions of some kinds of sentence and those of their double

negations, are to be semantically grounded? My recent contribution to the
volume on the Sorites edited by Elia Zardini and Sergi Oms (this volume,
Chapter 14) takes that question head on and also takes the opportunity to try
to provide a more rounded and complete overview of the problems and treat-
ment of vagueness from an intuitionistic point of view than was accomplished
either in the Quandary paper, the article for Liars and Heaps, or the contribu-
tion to the Dummett festschrift.
Maybe a preface to a philosophical book may allowably make a purely
philosophical point. If so, perhaps here is a place to emphasize that I do not
myself resonate with the Dummett–Rumfitt thought that it is only after the
provision of a satisfactory such semantics that the intuitionistic proposal will
be ready for the philosophical market. The proposal, after all, recommends a
revision of logic. So someone who thinks that it requires validation by a back-
ground semantics has to suppose also that logical principles generally stand
on firm ground only when sustained by an appropriate semantic story about
the logical operators involved. That thought is, in my opinion, by no means
mandatory.
Notwithstanding my own sortie into the knowledge-theoretic semantics
outlined in Chapter 14, I want to sound a note of reservation about the need
for any such underpinning for proposed logical restrictions specifically in
response to paradox. There are delicate questions in the vicinity here concern-
ing what should count as a solution to a paradox—questions concerning how
much, and what kind of, explaining of what is going wrong, one is required to
accomplish.
It is useful to be mindful here of Stephen Schiffer’s distinction (1996,
2003) between ‘happy-face’ and ‘unhappy-face’ cases. In ‘happy-face’ cases,
a paradox is successfully diagnosed as owing to a determinate mistake, or
oversight, which is identifiable as such by standards of our practices that are
in place before the paradox is considered. (The reader may re-attend here to
the concluding sentence of the quote from Dummett in n. 5.) Regrettably,
happy-face paradoxes have proved historically relatively rare. With a para-
dox of the latter, ‘unhappy-face’ kind by contrast, there may be little to offer
by way of diagnosis and explanation other than to say that the paradox is
spawned by concepts and conceptual practices that are in some way inher-
ently incoherent, or otherwise objectionable, and that have become
entrenched, and that the only solution is to modify them in ways which,
perhaps because of their entrenchment, may have no independently arguable
sanction.
Preface and Acknowledgements xi
So in the present case. As far as the Sorites is concerned, I myself am com-

pelled by the following train of thought:
• First, that we know the major premise of a Sorites is false because it is

inconsistent, by absolutely elementary reasoning, with truths (the rele-
vant polar verdicts);
• Second, that, in the usual run of examples, we clearly do not know that
the hypothesis of a sharp cut-off has a witness in the relevant series of
cases; and hence
• Third, that there, therefore, has to be something wrong with the
reasoning—classical reasoning—that, granted plausible forms of closure
of knowledge across entailment, forces us to deny the latter ignorance if
we think we have the former knowledge. And this conclusion must stick
before we identify a mishap—indeed, even if we cannot readily do so—
in the double-negation elimination step that concludes in the postula-
tion of a sharp cut-off.
In a recent seminar I attended in New York, a well-respected colleague was

heard to say that what the Sorites teaches us is that we ‘just have to get used to’
the idea that there really are sharp boundaries in all vagueness-related Sorites
series.7 I am vividly aware that a whole generation of (mostly Oxford-trained)
professionals have indeed habituated themselves to that idea (or anyway pro-
fess that they have.) But I venture to suggest that, for most, the three-step
train of thought articulated above will present an immensely more powerful,
commonsensical appeal. If the reader concurs, they will see that the idea we
need to get used to is not that of a crystalline world of unknowable sharp cut-
offs that spares us Sorites paradoxes, but rather the idea of situations where
classical logic lets us down.8 Why should we need a semantic theory before we
can accept the charge that there is here a gap that classical reasoning evidently
illicitly crosses?
Someone may of course, like Dummett, still insist that, if classical reason-
ing really is here unjustified, it must be recognizably so in the light of a proper
account of how we already implicitly (when fully lucid and reflective)
7 Actually, some of those who take this line on the ‘regular’ Sorites propose that certain forms of
modal Sorites—for example, what has come to be known as Chisholm’s paradox—require a different
response. This is not the place to pursue the putative distinction.
8 A common rejoinder is that arguments for the revision of classical logic may rationally be dis-
counted, since it has, after all, for approaching a century and a half, performed sterling service for us.
No doubt it has—in mathematics and the exact sciences. But not at all as a logic of vagueness.
xii Preface and Acknowledgements
understand the logical operators involved. Semantic theory is therefore

needed to give a correct account of that alleged prior implicit non-classical
understanding. This insistence can be appropriate, however, only if we take
the view that the Sorites-paradoxical reasoning, extended to the conclusion
that there has to be a sharp cut-off, involves a mistake that is in principle rec-
ognizable as such by the lights of the understanding of the key notions
involved that we already have. We have to be, in other words, in the territory
of a possible ‘happy-face’ solution. And, if we are confident that that is so,
there will now be a constraint on any semantic theory to be offered that it
present a plausible account both of the antecedent understanding of ordinary
thinkers and of why they are here inclined to misperceive its requirements.
Good luck with that project. Revisionary proposals have historically some-
times been motivated by a sense that certain logical principles involve distor-
tion of our understanding of the operators involved—‘relevance’ critiques of
classical logic are one example. But the revisionism of the intuitionist is not of
this character.
The intuitionist’s revisionism issues from a reformist stance. The semantic
project is not to recover an account of extant distinctions which, if someone is
seduced by the extended paradoxical reasoning, they overlook but, in the
wake of already well-motivated revisions of classical logic, to propose a
framework in which those revisions have an independent theoretical setting,
so that we can restore a sense of knowing what we are doing in inferential
practice and of how the suspect transitions may be conceived to fail. It is in
this spirit that I offered the knowledge- theoretic clauses proposed in
Chapter 14. However, if it is only for this purpose that it is useful, then seman-
tic theory is precisely not needed to justify the relevant logical revisions, to
persuade us of ‘the true solution to the Sorites paradox’. Instead, like Hegel’s
Owl of Minerva, it spreads its wings of insight only with the coming of the
dusk, when the day’s (revisionary) work is already done.
In arriving at and developing over the years the views offered in this vol-
ume, I have benefited from the published contributions of two colleagues in
particular. First, the stability of the intuitionistic proposal, as argued for in the
Quandary chapter, involving, as it does, maintaining a kind of agnosticism
about sharp cut-offs simultaneously with the thesis of Evidential Constraint
concerning a large class of vague predications, was challenged early on by
Sven Rosenkranz. My original attempt to defuse his objections is contained
in Chapter 8.9 Second, Stephen Schiffer’s writings have been especially
9 Rosenkranz pursues his criticisms in Rosenkranz (2009).

Preface and Acknowledgements xiii
influential in persuading me of the importance of what I term the

Characterization Problem: the challenge of saying what exactly a borderline
case is. Too much of the literature has neglected this or proceeded on
unexamined assumptions about the answer. But a satisfactory account of what
the vagueness of a soritical predicate consists in is the essential first step
both to understanding the place and significance of vagueness in natural lan-
guage and to the dissolution of the Sorites. Schiffer’s own answer, latterly
abandoned, is that the borderline cases of a vague predicate are those which
distinctively excite a certain kind of partial belief in competent judges—and
that vagueness is thus, in a certain sense, a psychological phenomenon. The
relevant special notion of partial belief is, I believe, very difficult to substanti-
ate in detail—some of the wrinkles are explored in Chapters 10 and 13—but,
in thinking of borderline case as a status grounded in features of our judge-
mental psychology, rather than in the semantics of the relevant predicate,
while simultaneously rejecting Bivalence, Schiffer made a key move in
common with the intuitionistic proposal.
One other issue is prominent in the chapters that follow. Anyone thinking
about vagueness needs to address the putative phenomenon of higher-order
vagueness: the apparent fact that the distinction between the clear cases of a
predicate and its borderline cases itself seems to have no sharp boundary, and
that the point must reiterate in vertiginous fashion. The apparent fact troubled
me for a long time before I hit on the argument of Chapter 5 that higher-
order vagueness is itself distinctively soritical. A different argument to the
conclusion that the very notion of higher-order vagueness is intrinsically
incoherent is given in Chapter 9. But a third argument, gratifyingly endorsed
by Riki Heck in their introductory chapter and drawing directly on my pre-
ferred approach to the Characterization Problem, has to wait until Chapter 12.
If it is correct, there is simply no such thing as higher-order vagueness, as
usually conceived, and it is accordingly no constraint on a satisfactory account
of vagueness that it accommodate, still less explain it.
Forty-five years thinking about these matters has built up large enough
debts to completely swamp my own investments. Besides the conversations at
the beginning with Aidan Sudbury and Michael Dummett, my work in this
area has probably benefited more extensively than even I realize from inputs
from so many sources over the years. But the following deserve special men-
tion. In the late 1990s, when I was fortunate enough to be awarded a Leverhulme
Personal Research Professorship for, inter alia, a project on Vagueness, I
enjoyed countless valuable discussions with my former St Andrews research
students Patrick Greenough and Sven Rosenkranz, who were then working
xiv Preface and Acknowledgements
on doctoral theses concerning, respectively, vagueness and agnosticism. Later,

I learned a huge amount from the regular seminar sessions with the partici-
pants in the 2003–6 AHRC- supported Arché Vagueness project: Agustin
Rayo, Stewart Shapiro, Richard Dietz, Sebastiano Morruzzi, Elizabeth Barnes,
and Elia Zardini. Elia, in particular, has, then and since, given me invaluable
detailed written feedback on early drafts of several of the papers reprinted
here. I also have profited greatly from interactions with my NYU colleagues
Hartry Field, Kit Fine, and especially Stephen Schiffer, with whom I taught an
exceptionally interesting graduate seminar on the topic in 2007. In more
recent times I have enjoyed very helpful conversations with Susanne Bobzien
and Ian Rumfitt, whose excellent, recently published co- authored paper
(Bobzien and Rumfitt 2020) has important points of affinity with the views
developed here.
My thanks to Dirk Kindermann, and Yu Guo for help at different times
with the Bibliography, and to Yu again and Sergi Oms for extensive and
meticulous work in preparing corrected copy for the Press. Special thanks to
Peter Momtchiloff for his usual tact and patience while I repeatedly put off
the work necessary to compile the final manuscript.
Finally, I am beyond grateful to Riki Heck for their patient, searching, and
perceptive critical reconstruction of my journey. Early in their essay, they
advise readers not to attempt the chapters that follow before they have assimi-
lated Dummett’s ‘Wang’s Paradox’. I strongly endorse the same advice about
Riki’s Introduction.
Crispin Wright
Kemback, Fife
June 2020
Origins of the Essays
The Introduction by Richard Kimberly Heck was specially written for

this volume.
Chapter 1 ‘On the Coherence of Vague Predicates’, was first published in
Synthese, 30 (1975), 325–65. It is reprinted here by kind permission of
Springer Nature.
Chapter 2 ‘Language-Mastery and the Sorites Paradox’ was first published in
G. Evans and J. McDowell (eds.), Truth and Meaning (Oxford University
Press, 1976), 223–47.
Chapter 3 ‘Hairier than Putnam Thought’ (co-authored with Stephen Read)
was first published in Analysis, 45 (1985) (Oxford University Press), 56–8.
Chapter 4 ‘Further Reflections on the Sorites Paradox’ was first published in
Philosophical Topics, 15/1 (Spring 1987), 227–90. © 1987 The Board of
Trustees of the University of Arkansas. It is reprinted here with the kind
permission of the University of Arkansas Press, www.uapress.com.
Chapter 5 ‘Is Higher- Order Vagueness Coherent’ was first published in
Analysis, 52 (1992) (Oxford University Press), 129–39.
Chapter 6 ‘The Epistemic Conception of Vagueness’ was first published in
Southern Journal of Philosophy, 33 (1995), special number on Vagueness,
133–59. It is reprinted here by kind permission of John Wiley and Sons Inc.
Chapter 7 ‘On Being in a Quandary: Relativism, Vagueness, Logical
Revisionism’ was first published in Mind, 110 (2001) (Oxford University
Press), 45–98.
Chapter 8 ‘Rosenkranz on Quandary, Vagueness, and Intuitionism’ was first
published in Mind, 112 (2003) (Oxford University Press), 465–74.
Chapter 9 ‘Vagueness: A Fifth Column Approach’ was first published in
J. C. Beall (ed.), Liars and Heaps: New Essays on Paradox (Oxford University
Press, 2004), 84–105.
Chapter 10 ‘Vagueness- Related Partial Belief and the Constitution of
Borderline Cases’ was first published in a Book Symposium on Stephen
Schiffer’s The Things We Mean in Philosophy and Phenomenological
Research, 73/1 (Wiley, 2007), 225–32. It is reprinted here by kind permis-
sion of John Wiley and Sons Inc.
xvi Origins of the Essays
Chapter 11 ‘ “Wang’s Paradox”’ was first published in The Library of Living

Philosophers, volume XXI, The Philosophy of Michael Dummett, edited by
Randall E. Auxier and Lewis Edwin Hahn (Open Court, 2007), 415–45. It
is reprinted here by kind permission of the Open Court Publishing
Company.
Chapter 12 ‘The Illusion of Higher-Order Vagueness’ was first published in
Richard Dietz and Sebastiano Morruzzi (eds.), Cuts and Clouds (Oxford
University Press, 2010), 523–49.
Chapter 13 ‘On the Characterization of Borderline Cases’ was first published
in Gary Ostertag (ed.), Meanings and Other Things: Themes from the Work
of Stephen Schiffer (Oxford University Press, 2016), 190–210.
Chapter 14 ‘Intuitionism and the Sorites Paradox’ was first published in Sergi
Oms and Elia Zardini (eds.), The Sorites Paradox (Cambridge University
Press, 2019), 95–117. © Cambridge University Press 2019, reproduced with
permission.
Introduction
Richard Kimberly Heck
The present volume collects most of Crispin Wright’s published papers on

vagueness.1 These papers represent the fruits of a career-long investigation of
the Sorites paradox and its significance for our understanding of language
and cognition. Anyone at all familiar with the literature on vagueness will
already know the early papers, as many of them have long featured as stand-
ard fare in any course on the subject. The more recent material, too—meaning
the papers published in the twenty-first century—will be known to aficionados.
But having recently read through the corpus myself, it seems safe to say that
reading these papers together allows for an understanding of the develop-
ment of Wright’s thought, and of the connections between the papers, that
repays the effort required many times over. The relations between the earlier
papers and the later ones are especially intriguing.
What I want to do in this introduction is to provide a sense of what I have
learned from my own recent rereading, and of the issues that seem to me most
to need attention. I will begin, however, by providing a high-level guide to the
papers themselves: to their content and their context. Afterwards, I will take
up five themes that seem to me of particular interest.
An Overview
By his own account,2 Wright’s interest in vagueness—like that of many other

philosophers at the time—was inspired by Sir Michael Dummett’s now classic
1 First, let me thank Crispin for asking me to write this introduction. It is an honour to do so. Though
I have been reading and thinking about his papers on vagueness for almost as long as I have been doing
philosophy—‘Language-Mastery’ was an early favourite—the reflections to follow grew most immedi-
ately out of a graduate seminar on vagueness that I gave at Brown University in the autumn of 2008.
(This is what accounts for the fact that references to more recent literature are mostly lacking.) Thanks to
all the members of that seminar for their contributions, but especially to my colleagues David
Christensen and Josh Schechter, whose participation was purely optional and most welcome.
2 See the introductory remarks to ‘ “Wang’s Paradox” ’ (this volume, Chapter 11).
The Riddle of Vagueness. Crispin Wright, Oxford University Press (2021). © Richard Kimberly Heck.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199277339.003.0001
2 The Riddle of Vagueness
paper ‘Wang’s Paradox’ (Dummett 1978: 248–68).3 Perhaps the most important
contribution of Dummett’s paper, as Wright again notes, was to make it plain,
first, what meagre logical resources are required to generate the Sorites para-
dox and, second, how utterly plausible the major premise of the paradox is, at
least in central cases. This is especially so in the observational case, which
Dummett clearly sees as critical: if two patches of colour are visually indis-
criminable by me, how could it possibly be that one of them looked red to me
but the other did not? But, if visually indiscriminable patches must both look
to be red if either does, then quite simple reasoning—reasoning that does not,
in particular, need to appeal to induction—will lead quickly to absurd results.
Dummett’s own dramatic conclusion was more or less Frege’s: that observa-
tional predicates in particular, and vague predicates more generally, are
logically incoherent, so that no proper semantics for them is possible.
One reaction to Dummett’s argument is to attempt to provide the seman-
tics Dummett had claimed could not be given.4 Wright’s reaction was differ-
ent. It was to see Dummett’s argument as revealing an incoherence in certain
very general assumptions about the nature of language use. Given those prem-
ises, Wright’s thought was, Dummett’s argument was correct, and what had to
go were therefore the very general assumptions with which the argument
began.5 It is the burden of ‘On the Coherence of Vague Predicates’ (this
volume, Chapter 1)6 to make that argument.
The general assumptions in question are ones any philosopher working in
Oxford in the mid-1970s might well have conceived as orthodoxy. Hence,
Wright styles them the ‘governing view’. The first thought behind the
governing view is that language use is, by and large, an activity governed by
rules, rules that competent speakers really do follow, not so much in the sense
that they consciously appeal to those rules—it is, familiarly, often a difficult
matter to say what the rules are—but rather in the sense that these rules are
norms that govern our linguistic behaviour, which is partly to be explained in
terms of our allegiance to them. The second thought then follows more or less
3 Anyone who is considering reading Wright’s papers but who has not already read Dummett’s is
hereby strongly advised to read Dummett first.
4 This is the reaction of supervaluationists (Fine 1975) and degree theorists (Goguen 1969;
Peacocke 1981). Contextualism and its variants (Raffman 1996; Soames 1999; Fara 2000; Shapiro 2006:
ch. 7) represent another class of responses. Wright pays very little attention to the latter. As it happens,
I also tend to think that such views miss the point. See n. 29 for my reasons.
5 An argument with much the same structure is given by Jamie Tappenden (1995), though his tar-
get is Timothy Williamson’s argument (1994) for the epistemic conception of vagueness. Tappenden’s
conclusions are very different from Wright’s.
6 And of the shortened version, ‘Language- Mastery and the Sorites Paradox’ (this volume,
Chapter 2).
Introduction by Richard Kimberly Heck 3
naturally. If these rules really are ones we follow, if our behaviour is supposed
to be guided by these norms, then their content ought in some sense to be
available to reflection.7
It should be clear enough that Dummett himself is committed to the
governing view, and it may well be true that it plays an essential role in the
argument of ‘Wang’s Paradox’. What is less clear is whether the governing
view really can enforce the key premise of the Sorites paradox, as both
Dummett and Wright require. We will worry about this below.
Not long after the two papers so far mentioned were published, however,
Wright himself became somewhat dissatisfied with his treatment of vagueness.
The paper ‘Further Reflections on the Sorites Paradox’ (this volume,
Chapter 4) is his effort to do better. That is a long paper, and there is a lot in it.
Much of it consists of critical reaction to a paper by Christopher Peacocke
(1981) that had sought to defend the governing view against Wright’s
criticisms by developing a degree-theoretic account of vagueness. Wright
answers some of Peacocke’s arguments against his own proposals, and he adds
new criticisms of degree-theoretic semantics. Many of these criticisms still
seem to me quite damaging. But, all these many years on, the engagement
with Peacocke is a sideshow, and what is most important in the paper lies
elsewhere. Perhaps the most important contribution is Wright’s analysis of
what he calls the ‘Tachometer paradox’, which I will discuss in some detail
below. Almost as important, however, is Wright’s isolation of what he calls the
‘No Sharp Boundaries paradox’.
As usually formulated, the key premise of the Sorites paradox is, for
example, that, if a patch is red, then any patch pairwise indistinguishable from
it (in colour, of course) must also be red. The key premise is thus a universally
quantified conditional:
(1) ∀x(Rx ∧ x ∼ y → Ry )
7 This second condition is what characterizes ‘implicit’ knowledge, in the sense in which that notion
figures in Dummett’s writings on the philosophy of language between roughly 1974 and 1985. One
can know something implicitly and not be able, at that time, to articulate it; but one is supposed, in
principle, to be able to articulate it. Note how this contrasts with what has come to be called tacit
knowledge. One’s knowledge of the rules of syntax—of universal grammar, for example—is in no
sense supposed to be available to reflection. It is nowadays a common alternative to regard our ‘knowl-
edge’ of whatever rules might be involved in concept-use as merely tacit. It would be worth investigat-
ing the significance of this point for present concerns. Some of what follows contributes to such a
project, though it hardly completes it.
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Will it please you to walk into the city, now that we have done
with Westminster, any day in these three years of the moribund
seventeenth century. London is busy enough, noisy enough, dirty
enough; but not so smoky. There is little or no foot pavement; but
there are plenty of posts and plenty of kennels—three hundred and
eleven, I think, between Newgate and Charing Cross. When the
humorous operation, resorted to with ugly frequency about this time,
of whipping a man at the cart’s tail, takes place, the hangman gives
the poor wretch a lash at every kennel the near wheel of the cart
grates against. Newgate to Ludgate, Charing Cross to the “Cockpit”
at Westminster, are considered the mildest pilgrimages to be
undergone by these poor flagellated knaves; but Charing to Newgate
is the real via dolorosa of stripes. That pilgrimage was reserved for
the great objects of political hatred and vengeance in James II.’s
reign—for Titus Oates and Thomas Dangerfield. The former
abominable liar and perjurer, stripped of his ambrosial periwig and
rustling silk canonicals, turned out of his lodgings in Whitehall, and
reduced to the very last of the last, is tried and sentenced, and is
very nearly scourged to death. He is to pay an enormous fine
besides, and is to lie in Newgate for the remainder of his life. I
wonder that like “flagrant Tutchin,” when shuddering under a
sentence almost as frightful, he did not petition to be hanged: yet
there seems to be an indomitable bull-headed, bull-backed power of
endurance about this man Oates—this sham doctor of divinity, this
Judas spy of Douai and St. Omer, this broken chaplain of a man-of-
war, this living, breathing, incarnate Lie—that enables him to
undergo his punishment, and to get over its effects somehow. He
has not lain long in Newgate, getting his seared back healed as best
he may, when haply, in “pudding-time,” comes Dutch William the
Deliverer. Oates’s scourging was evidently alluded to when provision
was made in the Bill of Rights against “cruel and unusual
punishments.” The heavy doors of Newgate open wide for Titus, who
once more dons his wig and canonicals. Reflective persons do not
believe in the perjured scoundrel any more, and he is seldom sworn,
I should opine, of the common jury or the crowner’s quest. He has
“taken the book in his right hand,” and kissed it once too often. By a
section of the serious world, who yet place implicit faith in all Sir
Edmondbury Godfrey’s wounds, and take the inscription on the
Monument of Fish Street Hill as law and gospel, Titus Oates is
regarded as a species of Protestant martyr—of a sorry, slippery kind,
may be, but, at all events, as one who has suffered sorely for the
good cause. The government repension him; he grows fat and
bloated, and if Tom Brown is to be believed (Miscellanies, 1697),
Doctor Oates, about the time of Hogarth’s birth, marries a rich city
widow of Jewin Street.
Different, and not so prosperous, is the end of the assistant
villain, Dangerfield. He, too, is whipped nearly out of his skin, and
within a tattered inch of his miserable life; but his sentence ends
before Newgate is reached, and he is being taken to that prison in a
hackney-coach, when the hangman’s assistants stop the vehicle at
the Gray’s Inn Coffee-house, to give the poor, tired, mangled wretch
a drink. Steps out of the coffee-house one Mr. Francis, a counsel
learned in the law of Gray’s Inn aforesaid, and who has probably
been taking a flask too much at the coffee-house. He is an ardent
anti-plot man, and in a railing tone and Newmarket phrase asks
Dangerfield whether he has “run his heat and how he likes it.” The
bleeding object in the coach, revived to pristine ruffianism by the
liquor his gaolers have given him, answers with a flood of ribald
execrations—bad language could surely be tolerated in one so evilly
intreated as he had been that morning—whereupon the barrister in a
rage makes a lunge at Dangerfield’s face, with a bamboo cane, and
strikes one of his eyes out. In the fevered state of the man’s blood,
erysipelas sets in, and Dangerfield shortly afterwards gives the world
a good riddance (though it were better the hangman had done it
outright with a halter) and dies. The most curious thing is, that
Francis was tried and executed at Tyburn for the murder of this
wretched, scourged, blinded perjurer. He was most likely tried by a
strong Protestant jury, who (very justly) found him guilty on the facts,
but would very probably have found him guilty against the facts, to
show their Protestant feeling and belief in the Popish plot; but I say
the thing is curious, seeing that the Crown did not exercise its
prerogative of mercy and pardon to Francis, who was a gentleman of
good family, and manifestly of the court way of thinking. The
conclusion is: either that there was more impartial justice in the reign
of James II. than we have given that bad time credit for, or that the
court let Francis swing through fear of the mob. You see that the
mob in those days did not like to be baulked of a show, and that the
mob derived equal pleasure from seeing Francis hanged as from
seeing Dangerfield whipped. The moral of this apologue is, that
Oates and Dangerfield being very much alike in roguery, especially
Oates, one got not quite so much as he deserved, and the other not
quite enough; which has been the case in many other instances that
have occurred in society, both vulgar and polite, since the days of
William III.
There, I land you at Temple Bar, on whose gory spikes are the
heads of the last conspirators against William the Dutchman’s life.
“Forsitan et nobis,” whispered Goldsmith slyly to Johnson as they
gazed up at the heads which, late in the reign of George III., yet
rotted on those fatal spikes. We will not linger at Temple Bar now.
Little boy Hogarth, years hence, will take us backwards and forwards
through it hundreds of times. The three last years of century
seventeen glide away from me. Plumed hats, ye are henceforth to be
cocked. Swords, ye shall be worn diagonally, not horizontally. Puffed
sleeves, ye must give place to ruffles. Knickerbocker breeches, with
rosettes at the knees, ye must be superseded by smalls and rolled
stockings. Shoe-bows, the era of buckles is coming. Justaucorps,
flapped waistcoats will drive you from the field. Falling bands, your
rivals are to be cravats of Mechlin lace. Carlovingian periwigs, the
Ramillies’ wig is imminent. Elkanah Settles, greater city poets are to
sing the praise of city custards. Claude du Val and Colonel Jack,
greater thieves will swing in the greater reign that is to come. And
wake up, little boy Hogarth, for William the Dutchman has broken his
collar-bone, and lies sick to death at Kensington. The seventeenth
century is gone and passed. In 1703 William dies, and the Princess
of Denmark reigns in his stead. Up, little boy Hogarth! grow stout and
tall—you have to be bound ’prentice and learn the mystery of the
cross-hatch and the double cypher. Up, baby Hogarth, there is
glorious work for you to do!
Unspoken Dialogue.
Above the trailing mignonette

That deck’d the window-sill,
A lady sat, with lips firm-set,
And looks of earnest will:
Four decades o’er her life had met,
And left her lovely still.
Not to the radiant firmament,

Not to the garden’s grace,
The courses of her mind were bent,
But where, with sweetest face,
Forth from the other window leant
The daughter of the place.
Thus ran her thoughts: “O wretched day!

When She was born so fair:
Well could I let my charms decay,
If she were not their heir;
I loathe the sunbeams as they play
About her golden hair.
“Yet why? she is too good, too mild,

So madly to aspire;
He is no boy to be beguil’d
By sparks of colour’d fire:
I will not dream a pretty child
Can mar my deep desire.
“Her fatherless and lonely days
Are sere before their time:
In scenes of gaiety and praise
She will regain her prime,
And cease to haunt these wooded ways
With sentimental rhyme.”
“Dear child! he comes.—Nay, blush not so
To have your secret known:”
On to the conscious maiden pass’d
Those words without the tongue;
Half petulantly back she cast
The glist’ning curls that hung
About her neck, and answer’d fast:
“Yes, I am young—too young:
“Yet am I graver than my wont,

Gravest when he is here;
Beneath the glory of his front
I tremble—not with fear:
But as I read, Bethesda’s font
Felt with the Angel near.
“Must I mate only with my kind,

With something as unwise
As my poor self; and never find
Affection I can prize
At once with an adoring mind,
And with admiring eyes?”
“My mother trusts to drag me down

To some low range of life,
By pleasures of the clam’rous town,
And vanity’s mean strife;
And in such selfish tumult drown
My hope to be his wife.”
Then darker round the lady grew

The meditative cloud,—
And stormy thoughts began to brew
She dar’d not speak aloud;
For then without disguise she knew
That rivalry avow’d.
“What is my being if I lose
My love’s last stake? while she
Has the fair future where to choose
Her woman’s destiny—
Free scope those means and powers to use,
Which time denies to me.
“Was it for this her baby arms

About my neck were flung?
Was it for this I found such charms
In her uncertain tongue?
Was it for this those vain alarms
My mother-soul unstrung?
“Oh, horrible! to wish my child—

My sole one left—unborn,
And, seeing her so meek and mild,
To hold such gifts in scorn;
My nature is grown waste and wild,
My heart with fury torn!”
Speechless—enchanted to the spot—

The girl could scarce divine
The whole disaster of her lot,—
But without sound or sign
She cried, “O Mother! love him not;—
Oh! let his love be mine!
“You have had years of full delight,

Your girlhood’s passion-dream
Was realized to touch and sight
As bright as it could seem;—
And now you interpose, like Night,
Before my life’s first gleam.
“Yet you were once what I am now,—
You wore your maiden prize;
You told me of my Father, how
You lived but in his eyes;—
You spoke of the perpetual vow,
The troth that never dies.
“Dear Mother! dearer, kinder far,

If by my childhood’s bed
Your care had never stood to bar
Misfortune from my head;—
But laid me where my brothers are,
Among the quiet dead.
“Ah! why not die? This cruel strife,

Can thus—thus only—cease?
Dear God! take home this erring life—
This struggling soul release:
From Heaven, perchance, upon his wife
I might look down in peace.”
That prayer—like some electric flame,

Struck with resistless force
The lady’s agitated frame,—
Nor halted in its course,
Till her hard pride was turn’d to shame,
Her passion to remorse.
She spoke—her words were very low,

But resolute in tone—
“Dear child! he comes.—Nay, blush not so
To have your secret known:
’Tis best, ’tis best, that I should go—
And leave you here alone.”
Then, as his steps grew near and fast,
Her hand was on the door,
Her heart by holy grace had cast
The demon from its core,—
And on the threshold calm she pass’d
The man she loved no more.
R. Monckton Milnes.
Studies in Animal Life.
“Authentic tidings of invisible things;—

Of ebb and flow, and ever-during power,
And central peace subsisting at the heart
Of endless agitation.”—The Excursion.
CHAPTER II.
Ponds and rock-pools—Our necessary tackle—Wimbledon Common—

Early memories—Gnat larvæ—Entomostraca and their paradoxes—
Races of animals dispensing with the sterner sex—Insignificance of
males—Volvox globator: is it an animal?—Plants swimming like
animals—Animal retrogressions—The Dytiscus and its larva—The
dragon-fly larva—Molluscs and their eggs—Polypes, and how to find
them—A new polype, Hydra rubra—Nest-building fish—Contempt
replaced by reverence.
The day is bright with a late autumn sun; the sky is clear with a keen
autumn wind, which lashes our blood into a canter as we press
against it, and the cantering blood sets the thoughts into hurrying
excitement. Wimbledon Common is not far off; its five thousand
acres of undulating heather, furze, and fern tempt us across it, health
streaming in at every step as we snuff the keen breeze. We are
tempted also to bring net and wide-mouthed jar, to ransack its many
ponds for visible and invisible wonders.
Ponds, indeed, are not so rich and lovely as rock-pools; the
heath is less alluring than the coast—our dear-loved coast, with its
gleaming mystery, the sea, and its sweeps of sand, its reefs, its
dripping boulders. I admit the comparative inferiority of ponds; but,
you see, we are not near the coast, and the heath is close at hand.
Nay, if the case were otherwise, I should object to dwarfing
comparisons. It argues a pitiful thinness of nature (and the majority
in this respect are lean) when present excellence is depreciated
because some greater excellence is to be found elsewhere. We are
not elsewhere; we must do the best we can with what is here.
Because ours is not the Elizabethan age, shall we express no
reverence for our great men, but reserve it for Shakspeare, Bacon,
and Raleigh, whose traditional renown must overshadow our
contemporaries? Not so. To each age its honour. Let us be thankful
for all greatness, past or present, and never speak slightingly of
noble work, or honest endeavour, because it is not, or we choose to
say it is not, equal to something else. No comparisons then, I beg. If
I said ponds were finer than rock-pools, you might demur; but I only
say ponds are excellent things, let us dabble in them; ponds are rich
in wonders, let us enjoy them.
And first we must look to our tackle. It is extremely simple. A
landing-net, lined with muslin; a wide-mouthed glass jar, say a foot
high and six inches in diameter, but the size optional, with a bit of
string tied under the lip, and forming a loop over the top, to serve as
a handle which will let the jar swing without spilling the water; a
camel-hair brush; a quinine bottle, or any wide-mouthed phial, for
worms and tiny animals which you desire to keep separated from the
dangers and confusions of the larger jar; and when to these a pocket
lens is added, our equipment is complete.
As we emerge upon the common, and tread its springy heather,
what a wild wind dashes the hair into our eyes, and the blood into
our cheeks! and what a fine sweep of horizon lies before us! The
lingering splendours and the beautiful decays of autumn vary the
scene, and touch it with a certain pensive charm. The ferns mingle
harmoniously their rich browns with the dark green of the furze, now
robbed of its golden summer-glory, but still pleasant to the eye, and
exquisite to memory. The gaunt windmill on the rising ground is
stretching its stiff, starred arms into the silent air: a landmark for the
wanderer, a landmark, too, for the wandering mind, since it serves to
recall the dim early feelings and sweet broken associations of a
childhood when we gazed at it with awe, and listened to the rushing
of its mighty arms. Ah! well may the mind with the sweet insistance
of sadness linger on those scenes of the irrecoverable past, and try,
by lingering there, to feel that it is not wholly lost, wholly
irrecoverable, vanished for ever from the Life which, as these decays
of autumn and these changing trees too feelingly remind us, is
gliding away, leaving our cherished ambitions still unfulfilled, and our
deeper affections still but half expressed. The vanishing visions of
elapsing life bring with them thoughts which lie too deep for tears;
and this windmill recalls such visions by the subtle laws of
association. Let us go towards it, and stand once more under its
shadow. See the intelligent and tailless sheep-dog which bounds out
at our approach, eager and minatory; now his quick eye at once
recognizes that we are neither tramps, nor thieves, and he ceases
barking to commence a lively interchange of sniffs and amenities
with our Pug, who seems also glad of a passing interchange of
commonplace remarks. While these dogs travel over each other’s
minds, let us sun ourselves upon this bench, and look down on the
embrowned valley, with its gipsy encampment,—or abroad on the
purple Surrey hills, or the varied-tinted trees of Combe Wood and
Richmond Park. There are not many such prospects so near
London. But, in spite of the sun, we must not linger here: the wind is
much too analytical in its remarks; and, moreover, we came out to
hunt.
Here is a pond with a mantling surface of green promise. Dip the
jar into the water. Hold it now up to the light, and you will see an
immense variety of tiny animals swimming about. Some are large
enough to be recognized at once; others require a pocket-lens,
unless familiarity has already enabled you to infer the forms you
cannot distinctly see. Here (Fig. 7) are two larvæ (or grubs) of the
common gnat. That large-headed fellow (a) bobbing about with such
grotesque movements, is very near the last stage of his
metamorphosis; and to-morrow, or the next day, you may see him
cast aside this mask (larva means a mask), and emerge a perfect
insect. The other (b) is in a much less matured condition, but leads
an active predatory life, jerking through the water, and fastening to
the stems of weed or sides of the jar by means of the tiny hooks at
the end of its tail. The hairy appendage forming the angle is not
another tail, but a breathing apparatus.
Fig. 7.
Larvæ of the Gnat in two different stages of
development (Magnified).
Fig. 8.
Cyclops
a large antennæ;
b smaller do.;
c egg-sacs
(Magnified).
Fig. 9.
Daphnia: a pulsatile
sac, or heart;
b eggs;
c digestive tube
(Magnified).
Observe, also, those grotesque Entomostraca,17 popularly called

“water-fleas,” although, as you perceive, they have little resemblance
in form or manners to our familiar (somewhat too familiar)
bedfellows. This (Fig. 8) is a Cyclops, with only one eye in the centre
of its forehead, and carrying two sacs, filled with eggs, like panniers.
You observe he has no legs; or, rather, legs and arms are hoisted up
to the head, and become antennæ (or feelers). Here (Fig. 9) is a
Daphnia, grotesque enough, throwing up his arms in astonished
awkwardness, and keeping his legs actively at work inside the shell
—as respirators, in fact. Here (Fig. 10) is an Eurycercus, less
grotesque, and with a much smaller eye. Talking of eyes, there is
one of these Entomostraca named Polyphemus, whose head is all
eye; and another, named Caligus, who has no head at all. Other
paradoxes and wonders are presented by this interesting group of
18
animals; but they all sink into insignificance beside the paradox of
the amazonian entomostracon, the Apus—a race which dispenses
with masculine services altogether, a race of which there are no
males!
Fig. 10.
Eurycercus: a heart;
b eggs; c digestive tube
(Magnified).
I well remember the pleasant evening on which I first made the

personal acquaintance of this amazing amazon. It was at Munich,
and in the house of a celebrated naturalist, in whose garden an
agreeable assemblage of poets, professors, and their wives,
sauntered in the light of a setting sun, breaking up into groups and
têtes-à-têtes, to re-form into larger groups. We had taken coffee
under the branching coolness of trees, and were now loitering
through the brief interval till supper. Our host had just returned from
an expedition of some fifty miles to a particular pond, known to be
inhabited by the Apus. He had made this journey because the race,
although prolific, is rare, and is not to be found in every spot. For
three successive years had he gone to the same pond, in quest of
the male: but no male was to be found among thousands of egg-
bearing females, some of which he had brought away with him, and
was showing us. We were amused to see them swimming about,
sometimes on their backs, using their long oars, sometimes floating,
but always incessantly agitating the water with their ten pairs of
breathing legs; and the ladies, gathered round the jar, were hugely
elated at the idea of animals getting rid altogether of the sterner sex
—clearly a useless incumbrance in the scheme of things!
The fact that no male Apus has yet been found is not without
precedent. Léon Dufour, the celebrated entomologist, declares that
he never found the male of the gall insect (Diplolepis gallæ
tinctoriæ), though he has examined thousands: they were all
females, and bore well-developed eggs on emerging from the gall-
nut in which their infancy had passed. In two other species of gall
insect—Cynips divisa and Cynips folii—Hartig says he was unable to
find a male; and he examined about thirteen thousand. Brogniart
never found the male of another entomostracon (Limnadia gigas),
nor could Jurine find that of our Polyphemus. These negatives prove,
at least, that if the males exist at all, they must be excessively rare,
and their services can be dispensed with; a conclusion which
becomes acceptable when we learn that bees, moths, plant-lice
(Aphides), and our grotesque friend Daphnia (Fig. 9) lay eggs which
may be reared apart, will develop into females, and these will
produce eggs which will in turn produce other females, and so on,
generation after generation, although each animal be reared in a
vessel apart from all others.
While on this subject, I cannot forbear making a reflection. It
must be confessed that our sex cuts but a poor figure in some great
families. If the male is in some families grander, fiercer, more
splendid, and more highly endowed than the female, this occasional
superiority is more than counterbalanced by the still greater
inferiority of the sex in other families. The male is often but a
contemptible partner, puny in size, insignificant in powers, stinted
even of a due allowance of organs. If the peacock and the pheasant
swagger in greater splendour, what a pitiful creature is the male
falcon—no falconer will look at him. And what is the drone compared
with the queen bee, or even with the workers? What figure does the
male spider make beside his large and irascible female,—who not
unfrequently eats him? Nay, worse than this, what can be said for
the male Rotifer, the male Barnacle, the male Lernæa—gentlemen
who cannot even boast of a perfect digestive apparatus, sometimes
not of a digestive organ at all? Nor is this meagreness confined to
the digestive system only. In some cases, as in some male Rotifers,
19
the usual organs of sense and locomotion are wanting; and in a
parasitic Lernæa, the degradation is moral as well as physical: the
female lives in the gills of a fish, sucking its juices, and the ignoble
husband lives as a parasite upon her!
Fig. 11.
Volvox Globator, with
eight volvoces enclosed
(Magnified).
But this digression is becoming humiliating, and meanwhile our

hands are getting benumbed with cold. In spite of that, I hold the jar
up to the light, and make a background of my forefingers, to throw
into relief some of the transparent animals. Look at those light green
crystal spheres sailing along with slow revolving motion, like planets
revolving through space, except that their orbits are more eccentric.
Each of these spheres is a Volvox globator. Under the microscope it
looks like a crystalline sphere, studded with bright green specs, from
each of which arise two cilia (hairs), serving as oars to row the
animal through the water. The specs are united by a delicate
network, which is not always visible, however. Inside this sphere is a
fluid, in which several dark-green smaller spheres are seen
revolving, as the parent-sphere revolved in the water. Press this
Volvox gently under your compressorium, or between the two pieces
of glass, and you will see these internal spheres, when duly
magnified, disclose themselves as identical with their parent; and
inside them, smaller Volvoces are seen. This is one of the many
illustrations of Life within Life, of which something was said in the
last chapter.
Nor is this all. Those bright green specs which stud the surface,
if examined with high powers, will turn out to be not specs, but
20
animals, and as Ehrenberg believes (though the belief is little
shared), highly organized animals, possessing a mouth, many
stomachs, and an eye. It is right to add that not only are
microscopists at variance with Ehrenberg on the supposed
organization of these specs, but the majority deny that the Volvox
itself is an animal. Von Siebold in Germany, and Professor George
Busk and Professor Williamson in England, have argued with so
much force against the animal nature of the Volvox, which they call a
plant, that in most modern works you will find this opinion adopted.
But the latest of the eminent authorities on the subject of Infusoria, in
his magnificent work just published, returns to the old idea that the
21
Volvox is an animal after all, although of very simple organization.
The dispute may perhaps excite your surprise. You are
perplexed at the idea of a plant (if plant it be) moving about,
swimming with all the vigour and dexterity of an animal, and
swimming by means of animal organs, the cilia. But this difficulty is
one of our own creation. We first employ the word Plant to designate
a vast group of objects which have no powers of locomotion, and
then ask, with triumph, How can a plant move? But we have only to
enlarge our knowledge of plant-life to see that locomotion is not
absolutely excluded from it; for many of the simpler plants—
Confervæ and Algæ:—can, and do, move spontaneously in the early
stages of their existence: they escape from their parents as free
swimming rovers, and do not settle into solid and sober respectability
till later in life. In their roving condition they are called, improperly
enough, “zoospores,”22 and once gave rise to the opinion that they
were animals in infancy, and became degraded into plants as their
growth went on. But locomotion is no true mark of animal-nature,
neither is fixture to one spot the true mark of plant-nature. Many
animals (Polypes, Polyzoa, Barnacles, Mussels, &c.), after passing a
vagabond youth, “settle” once and for ever in maturer age, and then
become as fixed as plants. Nay, human animals not unfrequently
exhibit a somewhat similar metempsychosis, and make up for the
fitful capriciousness of wandering youth, by the steady severity of
their application to business, when width of waistcoat and
smoothness of cranium suggest a sense of their responsibilities.
Whether this loss of locomotion is to be regarded as a
retrogression on the part of the plant, or animal, which becomes
fixed, may be questioned; but there are curious indications of
positive retrogression from a higher standard in the metamorphoses
of some animals. Thus the beautiful marine worm, Terebella, which
secretes a tube for itself, and lives in it, fixed to the rock, or oyster-
shell, has in early life a distinct head, eyes, and feelers; but in
growing to maturity, it loses all trace of head, eyes, and even of
feelers, unless the beautiful tuft of streaming threads which it waves
in the water be considered as replacing the feelers. There are the
Barnacles, too, which in the first stage of their existence have three
pairs of legs, a very simple single eye, and a mouth furnished with a
proboscis. In the second stage they have six pairs of legs, two
compound eyes, complex in structure, two feelers, but no mouth. In
the third, or final stage, their legs are transformed into prehensile
organs, they have recovered a mouth, but have lost their feelers, and
their two complex eyes are degraded to a single and very simple
eye-spot.
Fig. 12.
Water Beetle and its larva.
But to break up these digressions, let us try a sweep with our
net. We skim it along the surface, and draw up a quantity of
duckweed, dead leaves, bits of stick, and masses of green thread, of
great fineness, called Conferva by botanists. The water runs away,
and we turn over the mass. Here is a fine water-beetle, Dytiscus,

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The Riddle of Vagueness: Selected

Essays 1975-2020 Crispin Wright

Selected Contemporary Essays Saumitra Mohan

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Cinema, Culture, Scotland: Selected Essays 1st Edition

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Frege on Language, Logic, and Psychology: Selected

Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter: Power and Human Rights,

The Bone Riddle Sara E. Johnson

American Constitutional Law: Introductory Essays and

The Riddle of Vagueness

The Riddle of Vagueness

Preface and Acknowledgements vii

Appendix to Chapter 14 423

Preface and Acknowledgements

I started grappling with the philosophical challenges presented by vagueness

1 An interesting study of the early history of the Sorites is Moline (1969).

viii Preface and Acknowledgements

‘Davidsonic boom’. This conception is what I punningly dubbed the ‘govern-

Preface and Acknowledgements ix

topic—a treatment broadly modelled on the Mathematical Intuitionists’

x Preface and Acknowledgements

acceptability conditions of some kinds of sentence and those of their double

Preface and Acknowledgements xi

So in the present case. As far as the Sorites is concerned, I myself am com-

• First, that we know the major premise of a Sorites is false because it is

In a recent seminar I attended in New York, a well-­respected colleague was

xii Preface and Acknowledgements

understand the logical operators involved. Semantic theory is therefore

9 Rosenkranz pursues his criticisms in Rosenkranz (2009).

Preface and Acknowledgements xiii

influential in persuading me of the importance of what I term the

xiv Preface and Acknowledgements

on doctoral theses concerning, respectively, vagueness and agnosticism. Later,

Origins of the Essays

The Introduction by Richard Kimberly Heck was specially written for

xvi Origins of the Essays

Chapter 11 ‘ “Wang’s Paradox”’ was first published in The Library of Living

The present volume collects most of Crispin Wright’s published papers on

By his own account,2 Wright’s interest in vagueness—like that of many other

2 The Riddle of Vagueness

Introduction by Richard Kimberly Heck 3

Above the trailing mignonette

Not to the radiant firmament,

Thus ran her thoughts: “O wretched day!

“Yet why? she is too good, too mild,

“Yet am I graver than my wont,

“Must I mate only with my kind,

“My mother trusts to drag me down

Then darker round the lady grew

“Was it for this her baby arms

“Oh, horrible! to wish my child—

Speechless—enchanted to the spot—

“You have had years of full delight,

“Dear Mother! dearer, kinder far,

“Ah! why not die? This cruel strife,

That prayer—like some electric flame,

She spoke—her words were very low,

“Authentic tidings of invisible things;—

In a recent seminar I attended in New York, a well-respected colleague was