  Why is language vague? Vagueness may be explained and rationalized if it can
be shown that vague language is more useful to speaker and hearer than precise
language. In a well-known paper, Lipman proposes a game-theoretic account of
vagueness in terms of mixed strategy that leads to a puzzle: vagueness cannot
be strictly better than precision at equilibrium. More recently, \'Egr\'e,
Spector, Mortier and Verheyen have put forward a Bayesian account of vagueness
establishing that using vague words can be strictly more informative than using
precise words. This paper proposes to compare both results and to explain why
they are not in contradiction. Lipman's definition of vagueness relies
exclusively on a property of signaling strategies, without making any
assumptions about the lexicon, whereas \'Egr\'e et al.'s involves a layer of
semantic content. We argue that the semantic account of vagueness is needed,
and more adequate and explanatory of vagueness.
