The disputes we have discussed in chapter 2 do not draw the lines youd initially expect.

We saw that Ignorance, for example, does not straightforwardly separate the epistemicist from the supervaluationist. Opposing views about truth, the multiplicity of admissible interpretations, and validity similarly don't (on their own) seem to be as striking or profound as they might first appear.

However, there are a cluster of questions just beneath the surface that do seem to map out important terrain in the philosophical landscape. To set my own theory in context I'll raise a number of questions of my own, and briefly explain how my theory supplies a certain combination of answers to them.^[30]

There are many open questions concerning the epistemology of vagueness. Closely related to disputes about truth and validity, there are important questions about how to correctly reason with vague propositions, and about the proper doxastic attitude to bear to propositions you know to be vague—should one be agnostic, or something else? Once these are settled there are further questions about how to align one's bouletic attitudes—how should one care about the vague?—and about how to make decisions when one's information is vague. There are also many open questions about the logic of vagueness: How does the determinacy operator iterate? What is the combined logic of vagueness and modality? How does vagueness apply to other semantic types?

Theories of vagueness ought to be individuated at least partly by the verdicts they deliver to these questions. I do not think, however, that there is such a thing as the official ‘supervaluationist' or ‘epistemicist' line on any of these questions, and so these theories remain silent on many of the issues I take to be most central. The theory of vagueness I propose in this book arose out of an attempt to answer these questions. In what follows I outline the basic features of the view. I aim here to give no more than a rough sketch of the basic ideas, so as to give an impression of where the book is headed: readers should consult the relevant chapters for more rigorous treatments and explanations of the key concepts and ideas.

3.1