I was rereading Patrick Greenough’s _Vagueness: A Minimal Theory_ and I was struck by this footnote that I hadn’t remembered from the previous read through.

bq. [Crispin] Wright has argued that the content of ‘is true’ (and cognate expressions) is entirely exhausted by a ‘network’ of platitudes concerning truth (such as Tarski’s T-schema, the thesis that to assert is to present as true, the thesis that warranted assertibility and truth are distinct, the thesis that truth is absolute, and so on). Here, the idea is to apply a similar methodology to the predicate ‘is vague’ and cognate expressions. The challenge will be to locate a set of platitudes concerning vagueness which at least exhaust our everday understanding of this term while not pretending to thereby identify the underlying nature of vagueness.

That all sounds good to me, but what’s it doing in a paper on a _minimal_ theory. When I was growing up we was taught that that’s how you find out all there is to find about a philosophical concept. It’s a path to a _maximal_ theory! You do thereby identify the underlying nature of things. (Or at least as much of that as you can before the job is turned over to the scientists.)

Less flippantly, I guess the point is that while in metaphysics platitude-systematising is as much as you can or should do before bringing in the scientists, in philosophy of language/formal semantics we are (some of) the scientists, so there is a distinction in what we do between platitude-systematising and finding best deservers in the real world.