That essay ends with this paragraph: &quot;The vagueness paradox is this: although there is an extremely strong argument for sharpism, the <i>truth</i> of sharpism seems to require a linguistic miracle.&quot; (my emphasis.) The author concludes that the apparently strong logical argument ultimately fails to address the real issue, which actually concerns usage of the word &#x27;pumpkin’. It is a paradox (i.e. only an apparent problem) because there is neither a practical nor a logical necessity for ‘pumpkin’ to have a singular and absolute definition.<p>The allegedly strong argument is basically begging the question. It is crucially dependent on the assumption that, for any particular ‘situation’, we can unambiguously say whether or not it can be called a pumpkin, but that is the premise that it is attempting to prove. Another way of looking at it is that while we clearly have pumpkin at one end of the truth table and clearly do not at the other, the formalism offers no way to decide where the boundary lies: this representation has its own sorities issue, and models the alleged problem without offering anything that leads to a solution - substituting &#x27;true&#x27; or &#x27;false&#x27; for the presence or absence of grains of sand does not make the problem any more tractable.<p>A secondary problem is that it depends on there being a total ordering of situations, but this fails when we realize that pumpkin-ness is context-dependent: in some contexts, a set of chromosomes is a pumpkin, while in others, nothing but a whole plant will do. Different contexts will be satisfied with different subsets of the pumpkin&#x27;s atoms, and, in general, any one context will be satisfied with many different subsets.