Jason Stanley has criticized a contextualist solution to the sorites paradox that treats vagueness as a kind of indexicality.
His objection rests on a feature of indexicals that seems plausible: that their reference remains fixed in verb phrase ellipsis.
But the force of Stanley’s criticism depends on the undefended assumption that vague terms, if they are a special sort of
indexical, must function in the same way that more paradigmatic indexicals do. This paper argues that there can be more than
one sort of indexicality, that one term might easily have both sorts, and that therefore, and despite Stanley’s worries, vagueness
might easily be assimilated to one form.
Keywords Vagueness - Sorites - Indexicality - Contextualism