The Sorites Paradox and the National Debt

I recently read about a phenomenon called the Sorities Paradox. It's something that has fascinated me for years, but I never had a label for it.

According to Standford.edu, "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. "

That's a lot of big words there. Here's a better way to put it. Call it the paradox of the heap, which is essentially about vagueness.

For example, take a pile of sand. If you remove a single grain of sand, is it still a pile? If you remove another grain, is it still a pile? And so on. If you continue removing grains of sand one at a time, at what point does this heap of sand stop being a pile? 

Another example might be the bald man illustration. Suppose you have a man with one hair on his head. Is he bald? Most would agree that that is pretty bald. But if you add another hair, is he still bald? And so on. If you continue adding hairs one at a time, at what point does this man stop being bald?

In short, the Sorites Paradox emerges when there is a lack of sharp boundaries. Take, for example, a haystack. If you keep removing hay one strand at a time, when is it really no longer a haystack? As one who has had goats and geese, I would suggest that this occurs before you get down to one, but the line of demarcation isn't specific.

WHAT GOT ME TO THINKING ABOUT THIS was our current debate about the debt ceiling. How much national debt is too much national debt? One of the reasons our decision makers can quibble over these things is because debt is a given, but too much is too undefined.

This vagueness applies to a lot of areas of governance. Take homelessness, for example. How much homelessness is too much homelessness. 

What about crime? As long as we have a degree of freedom, there will be some crime. Can we ever eliminate crime altogether? Yes, by eliminating our freedoms we can make our streets safer. Is that what we want? How far do you really want to. go with that?

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Now going back to the pile of sand, start with one single grain and add one, is that a pile? If you add another, is that suddenly a pile? The paradox is that there is no single moment with the sand heap is officially a pile.

Which incorrectly leads to the belief that adding an additional trillion dollars to the national is still not "too much" debt. By this fallacious thinking, it would be impossible to have too much debt, which is nonsense.

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For what it's worth, the word "sorites" is derived from a Greek word meaning "heap" which is another word for pile. 

Unlike the Pythagorian Theorem, which is named after the Greek philosopher/mathematician who proposed it, there is no person named Sorites.

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If interested further see:  

https://plato.stanford.edu/Archives/Win2004/entries/sorites-paradox/#:~:text=The%20sorites%20paradox%20is%20the,application%20of%20the%20predicates%20involved.

Or Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox

It was in this article about Kylie Minogue where I first saw reference to this concept.

https://unherd.com/2023/05/kylie-minogues-glorious-artifice/?tl_inbound=1&tl_groups[0]=18743&tl_period_type=3&mc_cid=bf9a3b17ea&mc_eid=4056b47041

It’s a modern day sorites paradox: how many grains of sand make a heap? There’s no obvious cut-off point. Likewise, no one can say at what point precisely all the injections and incisions start making you look like a startled alien. Over several iterations, surgeons seem to gradually lose track of what the visual baseline ever was for a person. They start off replacing the timbers in Theseus’s ship but end up building a hovercraft.

The reductio ad absurdum of all such procedures is Madonna, who now resembles a living cartoon character. It was recently reported that she is looking for a surgeon to “return her to a more natural look”. This presents the intriguing possibility of a new market for the distressing of overworked celebrity faces, a bit like the deliberate antiquing of sideboards.