I’m starting to think my vagueness book may have to be scrapped. This would be a fairly big decision, since it’s the only book I can see myself writing any time in the near future, and people sometimes tell me books are important. (Although Ernie Sosa, Jamie Dreier and Steve Yablo all seem to be doing OK without books, and that’s just speaking about people from the immediate neighbourhood.)

There’s no one reason why it should be scrapped, but as a project it’s starting to look a bit disasterous. What follows is a quick outline of why it might join the kingdom of failed book projects.

Originally, the book was based around four main themes.

1. My semantics for vague languages, based around the concept truer.
2. My pragmatics for vague languages, based around the idea that uttering a simple sentence implicates it is determinately true, and that pragmatic force, or speaker meaning, is compositional.
3. My solution to the Problem of the Many.
4. My objections to other existing theories.

I didn’t have that much original to say under point 4, so that was never a compelling reason to write the book. Most of the criticisms were going to simply be observations that the rival theories only started to look interesting if you didn’t think that there was any theory with the virtues of mine. Most other theories look, from my perspective, like trade-offs that don’t need to be made. Obviously not everyone shares that viewpoint, and obviously I would say a little more in more detail in a book, but that’s what it would always return to, I expect.

The pragmatic story still seems to me to be correct, but it’s not particularly original, and it’s not (I suspect) particularly deep. Maybe there is something here that links up to other issues about whether implicatures are calculated inline or at the end of sentences, but I simply don’t know enough about the phenomena to write that paper/chapter yet. And the field is moving so fast that maybe I’ll never be able to catch up to it.

Which leaves points 1 and 3. And I like what I say under those headings a lot. The only problem is that they aren’t obviously consistent, and I don’t have any way to easily make them appear consistent. It looks like point 1 constitutes a long argument against supervaluationism, and the more I think about point 3 the more I think it’s one of the better arguments for supervaluationism. Originally when I wrote my solution to the problem of the many I thought it was a solution that could be adopted by any theory with a similar logic to supervaluationism, including even epistemicism, and certainly including my theory. But now I don’t really see how to do that. I’m thinking of adding to the truer paper a short “Here’s where I fear defeat” section, just on this point.

Finally, and this was just about the last straw for the book, I need to say something in the paper on truer about the pragmatics in order to (a) respond to some objections and (b) not mislead people about what my solution to the Sorites paradox is.

(Do I even need a solution? It’s not like there is one in Tim Williamson’s book. I mean that – it’s easy to know what Tim thinks a borderline case is by the end of the book, but very hard to know what he says about the Sorites. The one prediction you might draw from his book, that no one should accept any Sorites premise about a borderline case because it can’t be known and acceptability requires knowability, is, er, dramatically and staggeringly false. But no one thinks this makes Vagueness a bad book.)

Back to our main theme, if I’m going to say everything I would have said in the paper for point 2 in the paper for point 1, then the backbone of my book won’t be three papers, it will be two papers. That’s a pretty weak backbone. When it turns out the 2 papers are in a fair amount of tension, the book looks less and less like it should be written.

This is too bad, but I think what I picked up from Bellingham about what to do with the Truer paper will turn it from being a good paper into a great paper. Sadly, it will also turn it from a paper that could help support a book into a paper that couldn’t, or at least won’t in the immediate future.