 Second thoughts about higher order vagueness are difficult to sustain unless one also rethinks first order vagueness. Perhaps Peirce overreacted to the threat of futile inquiry! Where does the tail of a snake begin? When posed as a rhetorical question, the speaker intimates that there is no definite answer. But the tail can be located by tracing down from the snake’s rib cage. A false attribution of indeterminacy will lead to the premature abandonment of inquiry. Is heat the absence of cold or cold the absence of heat? Many physicists ceased to inquire after Ernst Mach ridiculed the ancient riddle as indeterminate. Israel Scheffler (1979, 77–78) draws a moral from such hasty desertions. Never give up! In an internal criticism of his colleague Quine, Scheffler condemns any attribution of semantic indeterminacy as a defeatist relic of the distinction between analytic and synthetic statements. Appeals to meaning never conclude inquiry or preclude inquiry.