"Some philosophers argued that vagueness was a form of ignorance: that there is a precise number of grains separating a heap from a nonheap..."

"... but we don’t know what it is. Others argued that vagueness was a result of semantic indecision: that there are lots of possible things we could mean by 'heap,' each of which would establish a precise number of grains for heap-hood, but we haven’t taken the trouble to specify that meaning. Still others, looking to avoid a sharp distinction between heaps and nonheaps, sought to develop nonclassical or 'fuzzy' logics, which experimented with degrees of truth... Fara’s theory [was] that vagueness was an expression of our ever-changing purposes: that there is a precise point at which a heap becomes a nonheap, but it 'shifts around' as our objectives do. In fact, because the act of considering two comparable heaps accentuates their similarity, 'the boundary can never be where we are looking.' No wonder we think it doesn’t exist."

From the entry Delia Graff Fara in the NYT compilation of essays, "The Lives They Lived," about people who died this year.