Abstract

While there are some contemporary defenders of ontic vagueness or metaphysical indeterminacy, a quite common view is still that vagueness or indeterminacy are really semantic or epistemic in character. The exact borders of, say, Mount Kilimanjaro might be disputable, and there might not be a clear-cut answer as to whether a particular boulder on its slope is part of it, but this is just due to indeterminacy in how we conceptually carve some aspects of the world. But the basic structure of the world ultimately is what it is. Nothing indeterminate about it, at least not on a metaphysical level. 

If we turn to the social realm, things potentially become more complicated since the ways in which we conceptualize objects in the social world do not just carve up an already existing social landscape. Instead, our conceptualizations of these objects, beliefs about them, and actions in relation to them, are typically understood to play a constitutive role in grounding the existence of the relevant social objects. Yet if many of the relevant categories and ideas are indeterminate, should there then not also be widespread indeterminacy in the social realm? And what would recognizing such indeterminacy mean for how we should understand social objects? In this presentation it is argued that the best response to the endemic indeterminacy of the social realm is a form of fictionalism about social objects.