ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the iterative conception captures a feature of vagueness that is real enough—the phenomenon of higher orders of vagueness—but that this phenomenon is ultimately an echo of a more basic feature of border cases and shows that it is a pseudo-problem. Difficulties in arriving at an adequate conception of vagueness have led many writers to describe a phenomenon that has come to be known as “higher-order vagueness”. The crucial point is the vagueness of “vague”, which shows the phenomenon to be unproblematic though real enough. The common response to the vagueness of the penumbra itself is simply to say that the penumbra has border cases. This initial focus on predicate vagueness reflects one aspect of the paradigmatic concept of vagueness: vagueness as applied to predicates and characterised by the presence of “border cases”. Since the mid-seventies this phenomenon of higher-order vagueness has come to the fore in discussions of vagueness.
