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Comment by Swiffy0 | Hacker News Reader

I've began to question the complexity of many of these paradoxes I run into these days.

In this case, isn't this just a matter of the definition of a "heap of sand"? The article seems to sort of forget to define a heap and just proceeds to make a problem out of it and asking questions like "when does a heap become not a heap?" when it was never even defined why would we call something a heap in the first place.

So I think the real question there is just that why are you calling something a heap in the first place and when you have an answer to that, that same answer will also help you with figuring out when the thing you call a heap is not a heap anymore.

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> when it was never even defined why would we call something a heap in the first place.

Cultural conditioning, technically, "just [the] reality", "you know what I mean", etc colloquially. It's a broadly "known" meaning, despite no definition, that's where the paradox comes from.

Lots of things are like this, the requirement(!) to fight wars for example - there's no objective definition for why we must do it, we just "know" that we must. And if you disagree with me, just ask anyone and see what they say (watch out though, quite often people will trick you and answer both yes and no to the same question, with complete sincerity).

Watch children playing house and listen carefully to how they talk, how they describe the details of their imaginary world, etc....its an innate feature of human consciousness, it never goes away, but it becomes cloaked by education, culture, "facts", etc.

The problem is that heap has only an informal connotative definition, not a denotative one. 4 grains of sand doesn't seem like a heap, but if your kid leaves 4 of his toys out you might consider it a heap.

So now what, does the definition of a heap have to account for the subject's and object's relative scales? Formalizing informal notions is not always straightforward.

You're totally right, and this exactly the sort of thing Wittgenstein set out to show. The trouble is that people have an idea of what a "heap" is and what "evil" is and what "knowledge" is and a lot of philosophy is concerned with pinning down those notions or at least saying something concrete about them.

I think the Sorites paradox may point to something specific about these kinds of ideas, which is not shared with the meaning of things like evil or knowledge. There's a page on it on SEP: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sorites-paradox/

keep adding sand eventually a heap, becomes a dune

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