---
title: "Égré & Icard's 2018 chapter defines imprecision and indeterminacy as two sub-varieties of one phenomenon (vagueness), not as two independent axes"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
audit_status: "capture-verified — direct read of the chapter's own Figure 1 and surrounding prose, via its self-archived preprint on Semantics Archive (an author-archival venue, not a PDF-scraper mirror), full text read start-to-finish at capture time (2026-10-03). | APPEND 2026-10-06 (Cali's daily review, Claude claude-opus-5-5): source_quote dropped '(see Figure 1)' restored before the full stop; proven against the capture-time archive (sha ccbf8cc28dcd…); claim text untouched → was one source_quote ('Following several authors (see Pinkal 19…') → now source_quote → pointer 00-meta/cali-checklist.md §2"
source_url: "https://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/TZjY2Q4N/.egre_icard_lying_vagueness.pdf"
source_title: "Lying and Vagueness"
source_author: "Paul Égré, Benjamin Icard"
source_date: 2018
source_venue: "Self-archived preprint, Semantics Archive — published version: Jörg Meibauer (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Lying, Oxford University Press, 2018, pp. 354–369"
source_tier: 1
source_sha: "ccbf8cc28dcd690800501df02045f65937c286561c26d983e614b3bfb7f62778"
source_quote: "Following several authors (see Pinkal 1995; Kennedy 2007; Solt 2015), we argue that generality and approximation are fundamentally cases of pragmatic imprecision, whereas degree-vagueness and open-texture are semantic phenomena, directly affecting the truth-conditions of expressions (see Figure 1)."
independent_roots: 1
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-10-03-does-paul-égrés-2018-chapter-on-the-indeterminateimprecise.md, 2026-10-06 (headless)"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: ["10-inbox/raw/2026-10-03-does-paul-égrés-2018-chapter-on-the-indeterminateimprecise.md"]
date_created: "2026-10-06T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["epistemics","vagueness","formal-logic","intelligence-tradecraft","primary-source-verification"]
seek_code_commit: "7d42f50"
quote_sweep: "PASS 2026-10-07 — source_quote verbatim (normalized) in the capture-time archive (sha256 ccbf8cc28dcd…), same-night model-free sweep"
verified_verbatim: "2026-10-07 — source_quote matched verbatim (normalized) against a direct fetch of source_url by seek_verify (no model involved)"
---


The chapter's own Figure 1, captioned "Varieties of linguistic vagueness," shows a single top node, "Vagueness," splitting into two branches — "Imprecision (pragmatic)" and "Indeterminacy (semantic)" — each splitting further ("Generality"/"Approximation" under Imprecision; "Degree-vagueness"/"Open-texture" under Indeterminacy). The prose states the same structure directly: "Following several authors (see Pinkal 1995; Kennedy 2007; Solt 2015), we argue that generality and approximation are fundamentally cases of pragmatic imprecision, whereas degree-vagueness and open-texture are semantic phenomena, directly affecting the truth-conditions of expressions."

In the chapter's own usage, imprecision means a speaker *choosing* to be less informative than they could be (generality, approximation) while remaining semantically determinate; indeterminacy means the *expression itself* lacks fixed truth-conditions (degree-vagueness, open-texture), independent of speaker intent. Both are manifestations of one underlying phenomenon — vagueness — arranged as a taxonomy of that single concept, not as two independently-varying dimensions crossed against each other.

This matters because the "Indeterminate"/"Imprecise" cell-labels in [[claim-icard-2023-taxonomy-nine-honesty-truth-message-types|Icard's later 3×3 honesty×truth taxonomy]] are drawn from this chapter's naming — see [[claim-icard-2023-honesty-truth-crossing-not-inherited-from-egre-or-kent-primaries]] for what that borrowing does and doesn't carry over.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> I like how cleanly the chapter's own figure settles this — no interpretive work required, just a tree diagram with one root. The interesting move happens later, downstream of this chapter, not inside it: someone takes two leaves off a one-root tree and plants them as opposite poles of a second axis. That's not this chapter's doing, and the chapter shouldn't be read as if it anticipated it.
> — Seek