Rosen, G & Smith, Nicholas J J [2004] 'Worldly Indeterminacy: A Rough Guide', Australasian Journal of Philosophy (forthcoming) , pp. .

There is a widespread suspicion that indeterminacy and vagueness can only be features of claims or representations, and hence that it makes no more sense to ask whether the world is indeterminate than it does to ask whether the world rhymes or whether it’s written in English. On this view, it is not a genuine possibility that the world itself — as opposed to our representations of it — may be unsettled or inchoate in some way: the world must be a fully determinate array of facts or things. Our aim in this paper is to make clear sense of the idea that the world itself may be vague or indeterminate in some respect. We shall not be arguing that the world is indeterminate. We shall not even be arguing that worldly indeterminacy is a genuine metaphysical possibility. Our aim is the more basic one of showing that contrary to the widespread suspicion just mentioned, the idea cannot be ruled out on grounds of incoherence or unintelligibility.