epistemicist

An epistemicist is a philosopher who defends epistemicism, a position about vagueness in language and thought. Epistemicism holds that vague predicates have sharp boundaries, but the location of those boundaries is a matter of fact and lies beyond our epistemic reach. In this view, there is a determinate truth value to statements involving vague terms, and vagueness arises from our limited knowledge rather than from the language itself.

The position is often presented as a response to the sorites paradox, a chain of vague steps that seems to undermine gradual reasoning. By positing sharp cutoffs with fixed but unknowable values, epistemicists aim to preserve classical logic and a notion of bivalence, while explaining why everyday judgments feel indeterminate.

The central claim is that for each vague predicate there exists a factual boundary; for example, a specific height could determine the cut-off for the predicate “tall.” Whether a given object counts as tall depends on where the boundary lies, not on an absence of truth conditions. Our inability to know the exact boundary yields epistemic uncertainty about borderline cases while leaving truth values determinate.

Critics challenge epistemicism on grounds of plausibility and explanatory power, arguing that fixed, unseen cutoffs may be ontologically unattractive or empirically opaque. They also point to difficulties in applying the view across languages and domains. Alternatives to vagueness include supervaluationism, many-valued logics, and fuzzy logic, each treating indeterminacy as a feature of meaning or of degrees of truth rather than as unknown cutoffs.

See also: vagueness, sorites paradox, supervaluationism, fuzzy logic, philosophy of language.