No Privileged Resolution

This paper argues that some cases of semantic individuation cannot be cleanly classified as either ambiguous or vague. The central claim is conditional: if no resolution of a term’s candidate readings is privileged, and if refinement of those readings never terminates, then the ambiguity/vagueness distinction is itself not sharply drawn in the present case; the best available classification is therefore unstable rather than completed. Applied to negation, the consequence is that a stock of negations that remains sharp at every resolution but keeps refining without terminating is not well captured by the received ambiguity/vagueness taxon- omy. The paper defends this claim by combining a philosophical argument from resolution- dependence with a formal model of endlessly refinable readings.