Abstract: 

When you talk about vagueness, you often talk about truth. Most views on vagueness and the related paradox of the sorites say something about truth. Degreeists, for example, propose that truth is not limited to two values but can take on many values. The connection between vagueness and truth is clear, but what about the connection to truth’s source, also known as truthmakers? Yes, at least for Roy Sorensen, who uses this connection to support his version of epistemicism. According to Sorensen’s truthmaker gap epistemicism, borderline cases are true but ungrounded: they are true, but there is no truthmaker at all.

Mark Jago has criticized Sorensen’s approach for its lack of consideration for higher-order vagueness. This is a significant limitation because explaining higher-order vagueness is one of the strengths of epistemicism. In fact, Timothy Williamson’s popular and influential variant of epistemicism counts it as one of the reasons to adopt this view.

This paper proposes a better approach to using truthmakers for epistemicism in the vagueness debate. Specifically, it presents a truthmaker semantics based on Williamson’s margin for error principle and demonstrates that the resulting semantics satisfies its needs (i.e., capturing higher-order vagueness and cancelling the problematic DD=KK principle).