Baldness Isn’t Just Physical
It’s also performative
The type of discussion we call “philosophy” has always been about making conceptual distinctions. Words, generally, distinguish one thing from another. At least, they sure try. But many distinctions are feats of imagination, and it’s hard to know where to “draw the line,” so to speak. This keeps philosophers busy.
Ancient Greek philosophers argued about what they thought of as paradoxes. These often involved the examination of some commonsense assumption to watch it fall apart. The thrill of the disintegration!
The sorites paradox is one example. “Sorites” meant “heap,” as in a pile of stuff. Considering a pile of grain, what distinguishes a “small heap” from a “large heap”? No single grain makes the difference. Yet we know that if we add or subtract enough, eventually “small” changes to “large,” or “large” changes to “small.” The question is: What number is “enough”?
It’s a game. Rather obviously, there’s no answer.
There’s no magic breakpoint between “small” and “large.” What we have are human opinions of piles of stuff. At either end of the spectrum, for very small or very large piles, we’ll have near-universal human agreement about which word is appropriate. Toward the middle of the spectrum, for medium-sized piles, we’ll expect more disagreement, and…
