Day: January 28, 2018

Metaphysics and fuzziness: Why tables don’t exist and nobody’s tall

~ squarishbracket ~ 2 Comments
  • The tallest man in the world is tall.
  • If somebody is one nanometer shorter than a tall person, then they are themselves tall.

If the word tall is to mean anything, then it must imply at least these two premises. But from the two it follows by mathematical induction that a two-foot infant is tall, that a one-inch bug is tall, and worst, that a zero-inch tall person is tall. Why? If the tallest man is the world is tall (let’s name him Fred), then he would still be tall if he was shrunk by a single nanometer. We can call this new person ‘Fred – 1 nm’. And since ‘Fred – 1 nm’ is tall, so is ‘Fred – 2 nm’. And then so is ‘Fred – 3 nm’. Et cetera until absurdity ensues.

So what went wrong? Surely the first premise can’t be wrong – who could the word apply to if not the tallest man in the world?

The second seems to be the only candidate for denial. But this should make us deeply uneasy; the implication of such a denial is that there is a one-nanometer wide range of heights, during which somebody makes the transition from being completely not tall to being completely tall. Somebody exactly at this line could be wavering back and forth between being tall and not every time a cell dies or divides, and every time a tiny draft rearranges the tips of their hairs.

Let’s be clear just how tiny a nanometer really is: A sheet of paper is about a hundred thousand nanometers thick. That’s more than the number of inches that make up a mile. If the word ‘tall’ means anything at all, this height difference just can’t make a difference in our evaluation of tallness.

Tall: Not.png

So we are led to the conclusion: Fred is not tall. And if the tallest man on the planet isn’t tall, then nobody is tall. Our concept of tallness is just a useful idea that falls apart on any close examination.

This is the infamous Sorites paradox. What else is vulnerable to versions of the Sorites paradox? Almost every concept that we use in our day to day life! Adulthood, intelligence, obesity, being cold, personhood, wealthiness, and on and on. It’s harder to look for concepts that aren’t affected than those that are!

The Sorites paradox is usually seen in discussions of properties, but it can equally well be applied to discussions of objects. This application leads us to a view of the world that differs wildly from our common sense view. Let’s take a standard philosophical case study: the table. What is it for something to be a table? What changes to a table make it no longer a table?

Whatever answers these questions about tables have, they will hopefully embody our common sense notions about tables and allow us to make the statements that we ordinarily want to make about tables. One such common sense notion involves what it takes for a table to cease being a table; presumably little changes in the table are allowed, while big changes (cleaving it into small pieces) are not. But here we run into the problem of vagueness.

If X is a table, then X would still be a table if it lost a tiny bit of the matter constituting it. Like before, we’ll take this to the extreme to maximize its intuitive plausibility: If a single atom is shed from a table, it’s still a table. Denial of this is even worse than it was before; if changes by single atoms could change table-hood, we would be in a position where we should be constantly skeptical of whether objects are tables, given the microscopic changes that are happening to ordinary tables all the time.

sorites.png

And so we are led inevitably to the conclusion that single atoms are tables, and even that empty space is a table. (Iteratively remove single atoms from a table until it has become arbitrarily small.) Either that, or there are no tables. I take this second option to be preferable.

Fragment

How far do these arguments reach? It seems like most or all macroscopic objects are vulnerable to them. After all, we don’t change our view of macroscopic objects that undergo arbitrarily small losses of constituent material. And this leads us to a worldview in which the things that actually exist match up with almost none of the things that our common-sense intuitions tell us exist: tables, buildings, trees, planets, computers, people, and so on.

But is everything eliminated? Plausibly not. What can be said about a single electron, for instance, that would lead to a continuity premise? Probably nothing; electrons are defined by a set of intrinsic properties, none of which can differ to any degree while the particle still remains an electron. In general, all of the microscopic entities that are thought to fundamentally compose everything else in our macroscopic world will be (seemingly) invulnerable to attack by a version of the Sorites paradox.

The conclusion is that some form of eliminativism is true (objects don’t exist, but their lowest-level constituents do). I think that this is actually the right way to look at the world, and is supported by a host of other considerations besides those in this post.

Closing comments

  • The subjectivity of ‘tall’ doesn’t remove the paradox. What’s in question isn’t the agreement between multiple people about what tall means, but the coherency of the concept as used by a single person. If a single person agrees that Fred is tall, and that arbitrarily small height differences can’t make somebody go from not tall to tall, then they are led straight into the paradox.
  • The most common response to this puzzle I’ve noticed is just to balk and laugh it off as absurd, while not actually addressing the argument. Yes, the conclusion is absurd, which is exactly why the paradox is powerful! If you can resolve the paradox and erase the absurdity, you’ll be doing more than 2000 years of philosophers and mathematicians have been able to do!

Is [insert here] a religion?

~ squarishbracket ~ Leave a comment

(Everything I’m saying here is based on experiences in a few religious studies classes I’ve taken, some papers that I’ve read, and some conversations with religious studies people. The things I say might not be actually be representative of the aggregate of religious studies scholars, though Google Scholar would seem to provide some evidence for it.)

Religious studies people tend to put a lot of emphasis on the fact that ‘religion’ is a fuzzy word. That is, while there are some organizations that everybody will agree are religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam), there are edge cases that are less clear (Unitarian Universalism, Hare Krishnas, Christian Science). In addition, attempts to lay out a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for membership in the category “religion” tend to either let in too many things or not enough things.

For some reason this is taken to be a very significant fact, and people solemnly intone things like “Is nationalism a type of religion?” and “Isn’t atheism really just the new popular religion for the young?”. Sociologists spend hours arguing with each other about different definitions of religion, and invoking new typologies to distinguish between religions and non-religions.

The strange thing about this is that religion is not at all unique in this regard. Virtually every word that we use is similarly vague, with fuzzy edges and ambiguities. That’s just how language works. Words don’t attain meanings through careful systematic processes of defining necessary and sufficient conditions. Words attain meanings by being attached to clusters of concepts that intuitively feel connected, and evolve over time as these clusters shift and reshape themselves.

There is a cluster of important ideas about language, realization of which can keep you from getting stuck in philosophical dead ends. The vagueness inherent to much of natural language is one of these ideas. Another is that semantic prescriptivism is wrong. Humans invent the mapping of meanings to words, we don’t pluck it out of an objective book of the Universe’s Preferred Definitions of Terms. When two people are arguing about what the word religion means, they aren’t arguing about a matter of fact. There are some reasons why such an argument might be productive – for instance, there might be pragmatic reasons for redefining words. But there is no sense in which the argument is getting closer to the truth about what the actual meaning of ‘religion’ is.

Similarly, every time somebody says that football fans are really engaging in a type of religious ritual, because look, football matches their personal favorite list of sufficient conditions for being a religion, they are confused about semantic prescriptivism. At best, such comparisons might reveal previously unrecognized features of football fanaticism. But these comparisons can also end up serving to cause mistaken associations to carry over to the new term from the old. (Hm, so football is a religion? Well, religions are about supernatural deities, so Tom Brady must be a supernatural deity of the football religion. And religious belief tends to be based on faith, so football fans must be irrationally hanging on to their football-shaped worldview.)

It seems to me that scholars of religious studies have accepted the first of these ideas, but are still in need of recognizing the second. It also seems like there is a similar phenomenon going on in sociological discussions of racial terms and gender terms, where the ordinary fuzziness of language is treated as uniquely applying to these terms, taken as exceptionally important, and analyzed to death. I would be interested to hear hypotheses for why this type of thing happens where it does.