Dorr, Cian [2003?] 'Vagueness Without Ignorance', (in draft) , pp. .

Is a glass that is two-thirds full pretty full? We don’t want to say ‘Yes’; we don’t want to say ‘No’. This reluctance on our part seems very different in character and origin from our reluctance to answer ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to questions like ‘Will Bush win the next election?’. A natural thing to say is that while in the latter case our reluctance is due to ignorance, in the former case it has nothing to do with ignorance: even someone who knew all the relevant facts wouldn’t want to say ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to the question ‘Is a glass that is two-thirds full pretty full?’ Glasses that are two-thirds full are borderline cases of the predicate ‘pretty full’; characteristically, when a is a borderline case of the predicate ‘F’, we are motivated to avoid either asserting or denying the sentence ‘a is F’ by considerations that have nothing to do with ignorance. In the first three sections of this paper, I will show how this “no ignorance” view can be developed into an illuminating account of the nature of vagueness and indeterminacy as essentially linguistic phenomena. The remainder of the paper will be spent addressing a powerful objection to the no-ignorance view, due to Timothy Williamson (1994) and other proponents of the epistemic theory of vagueness.