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Vagueness is one of the central problems studied in the philosophy of language. Multidimensional vagueness, vagueness which manifests itself with respect to multiple dimensions of the meaning of a predicate, has mostly been ignored in the mainstream literature on vagueness. Standard theories of vagueness are not designed to account for this sort of vagueness, since they focus on vagueness with respect to one dimension of meaning only. Grinsell (Grinsell, T. (2012). Avoiding predicate whiplash: social choice theory and linguistic vagueness. Semantics and Linguistic Theory, 22(0):424–440) has proposed an interesting theory of multidimensional vagueness which is based on the idea that the interaction between different vagueness-dimensions is formally analogous to preference aggregation, which is studied in social choice theory.
My two aims in this presentation are first, to argue that Grinsell's theory faces three crucial problems and second, to propose a more conservative theory of multidimensional vagueness which is based on supervaluationism and crucially relies on penumbral connections to account for the interaction between different vagueness-dimensions.
