Sorites [chat]adox
Sorites Paradox:
Premise 1: 1,000,000 grains of sand is a heap of sand
Premise 2: A heap of sand minus one grain is still a heap.
Repeated applications of Premise 2 (each time starting with one less grain), eventually forces one to accept the conclusion that a heap may be composed of just one grain of sand (and consequently, if one grain of sand is still a heap, then removing that one grain of sand to leave no grains at all still leaves a heap of sand).So, [chat], at what point does a "heap" of sand cease to be a "heap" and transition to, say, a "pile" of sand?
21 comments:
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It depends where you define a heap and a pile. If you define a heap as 1,000,000 grains of sand, then that is a heap until it is defined as some other number. If you redefine what a heap is, then 1,000,000 grains is no longer a heap. It's contradictory to couple premise 1 with premise 2.
Why would you consider something both vague and definitive at the same time? Depending on the context, yes it could be considered one or the other. But linguistically, is it not incorrect to consider something simultaneously vague and definitive?
I don't know exactly. I am not nor have I ever been a student heavily invested in linguistics. I must leave that answer to someone else.
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"I feel like my whole life is ridiculous."
You don't know the half of it you hipster piece of shit.
"Why would you consider something both vague and definitive at the same time?"
We would consider it vague OR definitive. The only way for it to be vague and definitive is to have a very skewed definition of "definitive", to maintain that a definition can be vague.
Which is only something argued by idiots.
The take-away of the thought experiment, at base, is that "heap" does not MEAN anything given that it has no definite definition. "Heap" has kind of a definition insofar as "a large group of something", except then we have to define "large"...and that is quite difficult.
It either indicates that language is fundamentally problematic in that language is fundamentally vague, or it indicates that our conception of language as definitive is problematic since language is fundamentally vague.
language is vague. i didn't realize people tried to argue differently...
"language is vague. i didn't realize people tried to argue differently..."
Many people try to argue differently.
The problem is that if language is vague then I fundamentally do not Know what you are languaging.
If you say "The dog is brown" and language is vague then I can only, at best, have a kind of sort of maybe close approximation at what you might possibly intend to maybe mean.
This is hardly ideal.
So, some strive to articulate or construct a language which is not vague so that Meaning can be preserved in the act of communication.
I do not want to maybe kind of guess at an approximation of what you might possibly mean. I want to Know what you mean, god damn it.
While attaining that is nigh-impossible, people still try.
Cause people really, really want nigh-impossible things.
Yeah. if i say brown dog, you will get an idea of what im talking about, but no where near exact. just google brown dog, which one am i talking about? Or I could say Jolly's brown dog, Henna, the lab. this gets closer to knowing what im talking about. But do you really need to know which brown dog?
Total disagreement, J.
The idea of something vague but definitive is plausible. To wit, Infinity.
"But do you really need to know which brown dog?"
The issue of practical necessity is not necessarily the concern of these sorts of inquiries.
That being said, we could assess the issue of definitive v. vague with regard to the ends specified for communication and simply deny the end of "exact communication" and rather maintain that the only end is for a generalized and vague communication.
Some maintain that "language works well enough for us to get about in the world". That is fine, excepting these sorts of questions:
1) Could it be better?
2) Is "get about in the world" the only concern?
3) If we take language to be generally vague, then who does "language works well enough for us to get about in the world", in fact, mean?
My main problem with the "this works well enough" argument is that it retards progress. If we settled with "paper towels work well enough" then we would never have gotten Sham-WoWs.
If we currently operate with the paper towel version of language, what is to say that we could not have a Sham-WoW version of language?
"The idea of something vague but definitive is plausible. To wit, Infinity."
Not sure how this gives both "vague" and "definitive".
My guess is that you mean "infinity" is vague and definitive in the way that, say "fruit" is vague and definitive. It defines a set group (fruits) but does not specify a kind (apples or oranges).
While that is a kind of vague, that may not be the kind of vague the Sorities paradox indicates.
In the fruit example, we could say that fruit is vague but definitive. If there is an apple, an orange, and a dog we could say, with a degree of definitivity that the apple and orange were fruit while the dog is not.
With the "heap" example, though, there is no definitivity to "heap" such that it could be defined in the manner of "fruit".
It is somewhat an issue of borders. 1,000,000 grains of sand is a heap. so then we take grains away and, eventually, it stops being a heap. But when does it stop?
Same with fruit. Is a tomato fruit? What if we find a way to, say, genetically intermix carrots and bananas or something akin to this? What constitutes "fruitness" and there is a distinct "fruit" or is this just a sort of vague way of pointing towards some kinds of things?
So let's say you drive a truck and you're hauling a load of sand. You get to the weigh station and the scale reads some number of tons. I don't know what trucks or sand weigh, so let's say you're driving the truck that should have killed Morrissey and the scale says "10 tons".
Then some fucking sophist comes in and takes a grain of sand off the truck. Are you still hauling a load of sand? Is the net weight still 10 tons?
I think we can agree that units of measure, ideally, should be precise and uniform. A gram should weigh one officially calibrated gram. A grain of sand has a weight but for the purposes of weighing trucks, that weight is irrelevant. In this respect, the truck scale is not exact, but it is precise enough to serve its purpose. If we needed to know the exact weight, maybe we'd try to measure it.
A load isn't really a unit of measure, there isn't some carefully protected reference standard load against which load scales are calibrated. It's just a word that means something like a pile, or a heap or whatever else we currently tend to agree that it means. If one day you see a small heap of sand and call it a heap, then the next day see a large heap and also call it a heap, and then add or subtract a single grain and still call it a heap, you aren't creating a paradox so much as showing that the word can apply to a range of things.
It doesn't matter that the term is vague, or that language in general is vague, because it generally serves its purpose and people are usually understood.
And then blah blah something about how context helps make language work.
"Adam and Eve were in the Garden of Eden until God kicked them out. Then they had to live elsewhere because they couldn't go back."
WHO IS THEY?! COULDN'T GO BACK WHERE?!?! etc
and for borders in heap definitions:
Put "Not going to happen" on one end of a line and "will definitely happen" on the other. Then put "50/50 chance" in the middle. Then plot "maybe", "could happen", "it's possible", "probably" and others on the line.
If anything, the fact that the words and phrases don't really have a set place is a good thing. How else would we dodge direct questions with noncommittal answers?
We did a thing one time where we had people mark on a US map all the states in the Midwest. Everyone knows what the Midwest is, but almost nobody agrees on what is and isn't in it. If we needed to know for certain, like if there were some "region tax" or something, then we would define it the way we define city and county limits and put borders on states and countries. But we don't, so we don't.
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Language is hardly ideal.
One of the Help Desk workers last year did his I.S. about Sorites and the problem of defining a cloud. Would you like for me to take notes from his paper in the library?
"Would you like for me to take notes from his paper in the library?"
My guess is that the paper discusses, at length, the inability to define "cloud" while, at the same time, utilizing the word "cloud" in a manner which belies an assumption that the audience has a general conception of the definition for the term.
Which is why I like reading things written about how languages is vague.
It is for lols.
J.. if you add or subtract one from an infinite quantity?
it's still an infinite quantity.
I have an ammount of X, say Sand.. and I call it infinitely large heap...
If I remove some sand? it's stil an infinitely large heap.
You seem to be dead set upon vagueness as a weakness, but vagueness is a necessary component of langauge. Without vaugeness, there's no such thing as a question. Even direct questions become unneccesary, as it becomes incumbent upon the primary information provider to.. you know.. provide all the information. Which he/she is now able to do, since vagueness has been overcome.
The alternative to vagueness is the "Ur Language" that expresses utter truth. And such languages in practice are unwieldy, with a billion similar but distinct words for similar, but distinct situations.
It's the bucket of Legos approach versus the toy chest of models.
"vagueness is a necessary component of langauge"
I recognize that Wittgenstein argued this. But that does not make it true.
If reality is not vague then language, the mirroring of reality, need not be vague.
Megatokyo no longer makes any sense.
reality is not vague?
There's that French Language Society or whatever that acts as arbiter over their language. They coin new words instead of borrowing from other languages and that kind of thing.
Everyone else seems to be on their own with their "usage determines meaning determines usage" shipwreck of sounds and doodles. The fact that language works at all is really kind of impressive. If one made logical sense and was never vague and it wasn't also a computer programming language, that would really be something.
I kind of hated that Ricky Gervais movie "The Invention of Lying", but it did play out what a rough approximation of what it might be like if people not only told the truth but did so without any provocation. Where we might say "nice to see you" or "how have you been" or other smalltalk thing nobody really means, they just offer up true statements that they happen to be thinking about. "I might try to kill myself tonight". That kind of thing.
.... You're missing a vital piece of your argument in claiming a direct correlation between reality and language.
Namely the conduit, us. There's simply no way we have the processing power to utilize a fully specific language and get anything of value done.
Even if reality is specific and a 1-1 matching specific language existed, we wouldn't have the memory to be able to utilize it properly.
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