Varieties of Vagueness

It is a common assumption--at least tacitly in methodology--that a solution to the problem of vagueness will cover all the varieties of vagueness. I can't think why someone would think this. In some sense one might want it out of a desire for theoretical unity, but what a pipe dream!

The fact is that vagueness arises from such different considerations it seems unreasonable to expect that dream to come true. At the very least one might have commitments in other areas that determine their responses to vagueness in certain ways.

For example before I ever studied vagueness I had views about language, composition, and constitution that determined my response to various kinds of vagueness. For example I accept PvI's answer to the Special Composition Question so I'm a nihilist for non-organisms and accept ontic vagueness for organisms. I also have prior commitments about reference fixing which commit me to supervaluationism (or on closer look degree theory) for not-wholly-defined predicates like "bald".

As far as I can tell, my prior commitments about quantification, events, facts, propositional attitudes, properties, and a bunch of other things determine what I'll say about vagueness there. So it's hard for me to see vagueness as a unified phenomenon in need of a unified solution. I might even go so far as to say that the best approach to vagueness is to sneak up on it from the sides, to surround it so to speak. A direct assault doesn't seem right to me.

Objection: this is true of any area of study in philosophy. You might have prior commitments which chop up your response, but then again you might not.

Objection: Your commitments might go the other way round: you might find that the only tolerable kind of vagueness is semantic indecision and so this might rule out ontic vagueness and so this forces you to choose an extreme answer to the Special Composition Question.

Reply: That's just what I was trying to get you to say. This is how philosophy works: the path of least resistance. Now it's hard for me to imagine having such a strong view about vagueness that it constrained my response to questions of composition, but people do vary widely. I do hope people think about how all their commitments fit together though, I think there's too much tunnel-vision in the approach to vagueness in particular.