This paper addresses three related issues concerned with the best way to account for the vagueness of our language terms and intuitions of the vagueness of the concepts to which they refer. In the first two sections I consider the relation between vagueness and goodness of example (or typicality) in the categorization of concepts, and address arguments advanced by Osherson and E.Smith (1997) and Kamp and Partee (1995) that claim to show that the two notions relate to fundamentally different aspects of conceptual representations. In the third section an interpretation of vagueness is proposed that relates graded membership to the social construction of conceptual boundaries maintained through language use. Finally I consider the sorites paradox as applied to graded membership, and suggest that at least one version of the paradox arises from an erroneous belief that the logical principles (such as transitivity of identity) that apply to the physical world also apply to our perception of it.