-By Warner Todd Huston
OK, you read that headline and assume I’m some anti-intellectual, backwoods rube, right? Don’t jump to conclusions yet. I am not saying that all philosophy is foolish, pointless, or idiotic. But often times people that study philosophy end up more interested in absurd postulations mounting on an always increasing scale until they are simply babbling nonsensically — but using big words to do it.
Take the so-called Sorites Paradox, for instance. Here is the claptrap that the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy lays on us to define the idea.
The sorites paradox is the name given to a class of paradoxical arguments, also known as little-by-little arguments, which arise as a result of the indeterminacy surrounding limits of application of the predicates involved. For example, the concept of a heap appears to lack sharp boundaries and, as a consequence of the subsequent indeterminacy surrounding the extension of the predicate ‘is a heap’, no one grain of wheat can be identified as making the difference between being a heap and not being a heap. Given then that one grain of wheat does not make a heap, it would seem to follow that two do not, thus three do not, and so on. In the end it would appear that no amount of wheat can make a heap. We are faced with paradox since from apparently true premises by seemingly uncontroversial reasoning we arrive at an apparently false conclusion.
This phenomenon at the heart of the paradox is now recognised as the phenomenon of vagueness (see the entry on vagueness). Once identified, vagueness can be seen to be a feature of syntactic categories other than predicates, nonetheless one speaks primarily of the vagueness of predicates. Names, adjectives, adverbs and so on are only susceptible to paradoxical sorites reasoning in a derivative sense.
This is an idiotically longwinded way to say that the Sorites Paradox tries to address this interesting question: at what point does a “heap” stop being a heap as things are removed from it?
Naturally the original question is not from our modern times. It is taken from the paradoxes associated with the ancient Greek philosopher Eubulides of Miletus, a contemporary of Aristotle.
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