Abstract:
In this paper, we produce a list of statements, yet not clearly unveiled, which formed our
Key-words:
Sorites, paradox, solution, errata, logic, human, Logic, Language, discourse, dictionary,
linguists, problem.
1.Introduction:
In [1], we have presented our basic reasoning trend regarding the issues raised by the so
called Sorites Paradox. Once Philosophy has allowed it to hold a standing equivalent to a
philosophical problem, we have also dared stating that we solved one of the oldest
Here, we present a summary of statements either implied by our writing in [1] or forming
This paper is also formed based on a declared need of at least one well known
philosopher, one of the most active researchers of the Sorites problem. It is probably
more useful to those who have been producing summaries of all solutions on the Sorites
presented so far, once it will help quickly identifying where our solution is placed
amongst those, what it has in common with previously proposed solutions and where its
main differences lie.
1. Statements implied or forming our inner mind reasoning when writing [1];
1. Conclusion;
1. References.
1. Logic does apply to the reduced scope of human actions where the Sorites problem
lies.
1.1 Discussion:
Amateurs might think that everything in this World may be passive of logical reasoning.
However, for the philosopher, there is a clear difference between what is part of the
scientific nature and, therefore, may become part of the contents of a philosophical
scientific paper.
An event of nature, for instance, such as a leaf falling from a tree, may be continuously
argued over, in what regards the scientific causes for the fall of the leaf, or what makes it
fall this or that way, or etc. However, such material will only become scientific upon tests
of physical nature, therefore being a matter only suitable to at most Physics journals, in
Thus, the nature of the event is philosophical, once it allows for philosophical theses, and
is also logical, for there are clear scientific reasons for all that. Nonwithstanding, the
study of the event, per se, and the precise determination of any of its subtleties, may only
be of physical nature.
Human oral expression, when seen from a non-human perspective, that is, words by
themselves, for instance, in a paper, detached from the individual (without a special
subject reading or presenting them), is fully logical. Only for this reason, such a matter
If the Sorites solution had demanded an anarchic sort of acceptance, say all individuals in
society agreeing with it, the problem could never be suitable to logical analysis.
But the Sorites seems to equate all democratic sort of questioning and, therefore, a simple
accumulation of scientific processes and methods, implying actions which are well
Earth who will disagree with the most basic methods of Science.
For instance, a schizoid or a retard will have unpredictable reasoning and judgment, and
may refuse to accept even that one coin of one dollar together with another amounts to
two dollars. In anarchy, there is obviously not a single chance for peace and growth,
groups of different thinkers always killing others or injuring somehow in the fight for the
It obviously is the case that only in democracy there is chance for order and progress of
true nature for the entire human kind. Therefore, Science has to be about democratic
solutions, instead, or logical ones (the vast majority of human beings agrees with it, or
accepts, but a few may disagree, an irrelevant figure when compared to the number of
proposed, this number being allowed to be only one human being (minimum number of
people present is two, always: proposer and audience). For each group, there will be an
agreement over the solution. Not very difficult to infer then that if one were able to find
similar enough already existing problems and accepted solutions, with same sort of
possible presentation, and amount of group results, one would have found a scientific
solution to it.
appears in the Sorites problem, is actually far more than that, it is a language
conjunction.
2.1 Discussion:
We all know how long human kind took to reach the most objective lingo on Earth, that
in which everyone would be able to build, read, and understand statements without a
single possible doubt. Basically, Mathematics, allied to Classical Logic, is probably the
only truly universal language, that language in which every single nationality will always
understand, with no mistake, the message intended by the writer of a text, with zero noise
person, from any part of the human universe, will be mentally saying to themselves, in
two, and one of them is three, then the second integer has to be negative one.
There is, realistically, no other possible reading for someone who has been adequately
introduced to both Mathematics and Classical Logic connectors, not mattering their
if it involved, like in Classical Logic allied to Mathematics, noise zero, that is, the
receptor who had been adequately introduced to the language, reading the text of
someone else, say in English, would always get precisely the message intended by the
However, what is not missing is noise in what can only be referred to, in a scientific
level, as trial of communication between different human beings. For those matters,
Unfortunately, the usual noise contained in human communication trials of any nature is
misinterpretations, than an entire text. In our just mentioned paper, we write about the
word ‘fire’ and an oral emission by a person X to the closest human being to her, in all
regards, intimacy being maximum as possible, a fully faithful and married for long
couple, the female addressing her loving husband in our piece [Littles..].
How many words needed to be added to ‘fire’ so that the message intended by the
speaker would reach the listener, as intended, in due time in our proposed life situation?
3, and what could be seen as an entire acting scene of a play by the speaker!
‘Then’, which is the original word forming the Sorites, even though ‘therefore’ would
have been the closest Classical Logic term to the intended meaning, is not different from
Whilst ‘then’, from Classical Logic, bears noise zero, absolute zero, ‘then’, from the
English language lexicon, bears a noise which may go from zero to infinity ( all
depending on the spiritual closeness, as we could put it, between the speaker and the
As an application of the word with noise zero, the own mathematical example will do. As
an application of the word with noise infinity, consider, for instance: ‘I hold no money, I
hold no love, then I will kill myself‘, when uttered by the most balanced person alive, in
Noise is infinity, first of all, because a balanced person would not commit suicide on any
stupid circumstances, so that one would tend not to believe the assertion. However,
patterns, or any sort of pre-observed patterns, that it is quite possible that the speaker
actually meant it. The difference between a joke and an actual advertised suicide trial is
as bad as the difference between laughing, enjoying, with nothing evil implied, and being
difference between having a better day because of the assertion and ending up in jail for,
perhaps, maximum time, or, in some countries, getting killed.
shorten up, in language, but we actually mean the association between Mathematics and
Classical Logic), all elements in the sentence must belong to it. However, `color’ and
`heap`, for instance, when not associated to accurate and complete machine classification,
but to human sight classification, has to be part of the complementary set of words to
that of the mathematical words. If a single word escapes Mathematics, then the entire
sentence cannot, possibly, there belong. Therefore, such a ‘then’ can only be located in
the complementary set of the English language, to that of the Classical Logic lingo.
3.1 Discussion:
Of course there is a primordial difference between ‘fully logical’, in the computers sense,
and ‘fully logical’ in the philosophical sense. Just like what we previously wrote about
‘then’, ‘fully logical’ compares to ‘then’ from the English language lexicon when it
regards Philosophy and to ‘then’ from the highly specialized Classical Logic lingo when
However, our statement, the third, actually encompasses both choices just mentioned, in
terms of possible senses: Human normal reasoning, or reasoning in a human who is seen
as normal, in all senses, is neither fully computational nor fully philosophical. The
4) The ‘Sorites’ is not about fully logical contemplation of the human reasoning.
Just for starters, even if all emotions, of all individuals on Earth, could be made machine-
detectable, what is always possible, for even if we insert one by one, in being a finite
number of individuals on Earth, it has to be feasible, and so could all mental images of
each person on Earth, by time they think, there is still an at least occasional intentional
discrepancy between what an individual thinks and what they actually write, speak, or
communicate in any other way, to any number of other individuals in society. Such a
distortion is ALSO an intended human quality, what makes us being the richest beings on
Earth, therefore the most interesting ones. Nonwithstanding, suppose the computer is able
to match thought with declarations of that individual. Is it possible that anyone on Earth
understands, themselves, all utterances they make, be them in writing, speech, or others?
Then, assuming the obvious, that not even the speaker, writer, or conveyer of the
message, knows the meaning of what they speak, write, or convey, is it possible that their
subconsciousness does? And if it ever does, it is assumed that only a machine placed
inside of the head of each individual would make it possible for the computer to actually
‘tell’, with no mistake, what the message intended by the writer/speaker/conveyer is. And
because each individual will definitely have their own ‘thing’, for no two individuals are
alike, not even two retards, unless the entire human kind is found slaved with a biotech in
their heads, there is no chance for any logical system, of the computer sort, to perfectly
describe the message contained in a randomly chosen individual’s utterance, of any type.
This is obviously the roughest, or grossest, reasoning of all, regarding such a set of
issues. Therefore, we may assert, with no possible mistake, that Human Normal
Reasoning (HNR) will never be fully logical in the computers sense, minimum condition
for a single human being’s reasoning to be fully logical, in the computers sense, being an
In not being fully logical in the computers sense, HNR could still be fully logical in the
philosophical sense. However, if the inner thinking holds actually a good chance of not
matching the discourse, of any type, of an individual, HNR cannot, ever, possibly, be told
to be fully logical in the philosophical sense either, for the most basic pre-requisite for
The point is that the individual’s translation of their perceptions (using body senses) into
words is obviously part of the HNR, not of the machines world or the philosophical
world.
And if we pushed it quite a lot and decided to state that HNR is solely what is thought of
by the brains, then there is no chance for it to be philosophical at all, for Philosophy does
imply expression of reasoning, for nobody can talk with the brains of the person, ignoring
the complexity of the individual, and still assert that communication between human
beings has taken place. If such an atrocity ever happens in human kind, that is, people are
actually reduced to their brains, then we do not have a human being anymore, we have a
piece of one. Therefore, we have escaped the proposed issue and left the scope of
Science, trivially.
The Sorites is not about fully logical contemplation of the human reasoning because
nobody is aware, in full, of the human reasoning involved in human expression taking
place in each soritical sequence proposal/reception by audience. In those regards, one
must read our paper on what a philosophical problem should be [4] to understand why the
is passive of addressing via Philosophy, but cannot be placed under Computer Science or
any other reduction of Philosophy: It has to be placed in a root sector, being the top level
of reasoning in Philosophy involving broadest mental work of all, and of highest level,
therefore it has to lie where the democratic solutions live: Purest Philosophy of
Language. Analysis is the key-word to locate the Bloom’s taxonomy level where the
Sorites rests. The Sorites is then not about fully logical contemplation, but about fully
1. Bloom‘s taxonomy may be used to easily prove that the Sorites cannot, ever, be
4.1 Discussion:
Mathematics, per se, would definitely refer solely to the solution and proposal of
problems, as well as the stating of their rules, in general, never to the reasoning which has
lead to any of those. The reasoning leading to any of those is actually located in the
Classical Logic also refers only to a tool which will make all mathematical reasoning,
rather than language, which is a severely messy/incompetent tool for human expression
in terms of communication. Just like in the previous paragraph, the reasoning leading to
all its contents is definitely placed in the highest levels of the Bloom’s taxonomy, but the
actual ‘entity’, Classical Logic, or Mathematics, is definitely placed in the lowest levels
instead (application).
To understand how things go, in what regards the entire process of human interaction, we
need to rank, by complexity order, all elements involved in such a process. We believe
there are no doubts as to the most complex piece of it being what goes on inside of a
person’s mind.
Second most complex piece of such a process would obviously be what is actually
number being allowed to be anything between one and the total number of human beings
on the Planet, therefore what actually goes on at the translation interface between the
brains and what comes out of the individual in terms of trial of communication, or
expression.
On the other hand, the matters will only be suitable for philosophical discussions, of any
order, once there is something written by human beings, or expressed via language, or
expressed somehow, that is, it is necessary an expression, seen as such by at least another
person in society, for us to even start thinking of debating about the issues inside of the
realm of Philosophy.
However, with it, one may ALSO express reasoning of highest order, that is: Analysis and
Synthesis. Once it is possible that a human being is able to accurately describe the own
analysis and the own synthesis processes of theirs, language cannot, ever, be entirely
reduced to the lowest levels of Bloom’s taxonomy, where Classical Logic and
Mathematics lie.
If we then prove that the Sorites can only be placed, as it is originally stated, under the
umbrella of language which escapes both Classical Logic and Mathematics, it is obvious
that no expressed reasoning belonging to any of them will be suitable to addressing its
issues.
1. The Sorites is formed from a few elements of discourse: The adjective, possibly a
color, is one of the possible elements, and so is the substantive ‘heap`, for instance.
It occurs, however, that such element, the ‘name’ to be applied to real world
5.1 Discussion:
There has been a lot of study involved in the foundations of Mathematics in order to have
it all expressed in most objective lingo which could possibly exist on Earth. As stated
previously, the intentions were obviously having noise zero in any trial of mathematical
Colors, however, cannot possibly be communicated with noise zero from one person to
In this case, noise zero is only achieved when the colors are passive of computational
treatment, that is, insertion in a computer as data.
The same way, ‘heap’ cannot be communicated with noise zero from one person to
That seems to be precisely the point of the Sorites: The search for a computational sort of
treatment of the word ‘heap’, of any of the colors of the color spectrum, or all other terms
However, so far, such a complete computational treatment of those terms does not exist
and one can see that there is no limit for the creation of new lexicon words which may be
Thus, even if it were ever possible to ‘force’ ‘beautiful’ language words, applied at the
discretion of the communicator, into a confined scope of pointed World objects, one
could never have all of them locked in in that place at the same time, due to the dynamics
Once everything, both in Mathematics and Computer Science, has to bear no mistake,
one may easily assert, with one hundred percent certainty, that those terms are definitely
not mathematical or computational terms, for asserting the opposite would trivially imply
that all terms of that nature are found in the universe in mathematical or computational
terms as a whole, that is, with no possible word as exception to that rule.
With all the stated above, we reach the conclusion that the adjectives, as well as the other
soritical terms, belong to human discourse and human mind, only: They may be the
object of logical reasoning but cannot, ever, be the end of the problem ( to tell what red is
for everyone in the World, for instance ). What may belong to Science is a decision
theory, at most, in those regards, then, once the words must remain acceptable for human
Computer Science works with logical systems. The main characteristic of any system is
impossible to state that everyone on Earth will call a certain color ‘red’ if we all decide,
today, that ‘red’ will mean x degrees of brightness, y degrees of definition, etc.
Nobody can, thanks God so far, shut up a human being whenever they wish, if that
human being is not making a violence against the rights of another person in society, or
against the law. Therefore, if anyone on Earth believes the impossible to be believed, that
a ‘normal’ person would never apply red to a color which has got x-1 degrees of
brightness instead of x, and would claim their rights of having applied the term correctly,
Basically, who can stop any human being from applying any lexicon word in any
situation they wish? As simplest real life scenario, anyone can simply open the dictionary
and read at random ‘red’. The word is being applied, there cannot be mistake in its
application, for it was simply red, yet it is not referring to the expected objects containing
Obviously the case that the problem is an allurement only, never an actual problem.
‘If I add one grain to the previous thing we have all agreed to name ‘non-heap’, will it
One can tell that even if we wrote in the dictionary that it is, for instance, 100 grains, the
person then would create another problem with ‘what sort of sand, how much refined the
First of all, it might not be a heap for that auditorium of people, but it might be a heap for
another, so that it is ridiculous even thinking of doing such with any term of language.
(considering them mathematical or computational only when the entire class of them is,
once a few shades of color may always be inserted in a computer, we just cannot insert all
of them, at the moment) of language is obviously how ‘vague’ they might be in their
application and the person applying them still be told to be ‘normal’. With the
mathematical or computational terms, however, the person would be told insane if the
else. Say, for instance, a person attending a talk in Mathematics interrupts the presenter of
a theory to state that he has lied because 5 on the board should be called seven instead!?
And they then want to start a discussion on where five ends and seven starts in
Mathematics…Oh, easy to see people would be kicking out the element from the room
quite quickly…
‘Idiot! A 5 is a five, this is not Philosophy or some other sort of trip! Out.’
The thing about computational elements, niche where Mathematics is found, is that all its
terms would have to be absolute, in terms of everyone on Earth, when seeing them, they
all knowing, univocally, what their match of object is in the real World. Whoever works
with computers knows, the thing is never wasting time and whatever may be done for
So, also the simple raising of such a discussion would irritate people from the area
profoundly.
Why? Because they do not have a problem with that. If they ever find the need of using a
color in a computer program, they will certainly also find a way of expressing that color
Obviously the case that such a discussion only fits Philosophy of Language, for it refers
to the scope of possible applications of a lexicon word which is usually lose in its
application, that is, at the discretion of the sight and judgment powers of the person
applying it.
The trial of refining meaning of a word can only be seen as the same work performed by
the linguist, if we are ever looking for a universal sort of definition, accepted by the entire
World, for that is how, and why, the lexicons are formed. Obviously the case that before
the first lexicon has been written on Earth, at least one person had the same doubts as
those of the Sorites presenter: Where does ‘heap’ start existing in this dynamic sand
accumulation scenery? Where does ‘red’ start existing in this dynamic shade changing
scenery? When can I use it so that you will understand that is what I mean? Do you agree
The situation we face here is the same splitting mathematicians and their work from
engineers and theirs: Basically, when a builder has a doubt as to whether they will take
0.9 of the ruler or 0.99 or they cannot read the ruler at all, they do not go to the
mathematician or the computer scientist to ask what figure they will write on their notes.
They go for the engineer. The engineer gives them a recipe for approximation of results,
which should be the same used all over the World in construction. Such a recipe, for both
the mathematician and the computer scientist, will be almost of no use, already for
starters. Not for the statistician, however, who will consider their rules for approximation
and declare there will be a mistake of x% at most in each result computed. The same sort
paradigms, to our Sorites case. Whilst the linguist would be occupying the place of the
engineer, philosophers should be occupying the place of the statistician, and both
computer scientists and mathematicians should be watching until they all finish, for they
obviously have as much to do with construction decisions as they would have to do with
lexicon ones…
Of course several mathematicians, and computer scientists, of these days, will calculate
the mistake of the ruler, as for the builder, but it is obvious that they will not be able to
decide in place of the builder if the ruler shows 0.9 or 0.99, or even 0.989 instead. The
same way the builder will be the ultimate decision maker, and poor, or lucky, of the
people depending on the construction to live in it, the ultimate decision maker, in lexicon
words, will be the linguist and poor, or lucky, of us, who will have to live with the
result…
As a less scientific line of argumentation, imagine a poet being told that they have
applied the word ‘love’, in a situation x, with 3% of mistake in what regards the ‘revised
approximately, from the meaning determined by computer scientists based on the lexicon
If there is anyone on Earth who does not think this is ridiculous, please raise your hands
(sorry, cannot see at the moment, so we may as well just keep on going!).
Earth and is working should not be questioned or changed. Even the dumbest soccer
Linguists do a great job, we all trust them, and nobody is really interested in changing the
way words go in the dictionary. If we ever were, we would probably be joining the own
linguists, that is, becoming one of them, so why bothering being from another area?
Yes, the scientific subject of Philosophy would include lexicon theories, but our point is
that the Sorites needs one to address its issues, not that Philosophy cannot bother about
lexicon theories.
1. Machines are not human beings and, with luck, will never be.
6.1 Discussion:
Were there any chance a human being equated a machine, everyone would be happy with
the proposal of the Sorites: Hey, you are one grain mistaken, it is not a ‘heap’!
However, unless they get to impair and slave, or modify genetically, or kill human beings,
then such a phenomenon will not happen in human language. There is no doubt people
love Arts and nobody wants someone telling ‘Caetano Veloso’ he cannot sing ‘nao me
amarra dinheiro nao’ because nobody is getting the meaning he intended when writing
that song when he sings, that it is probably better he sings ‘nao diz que eu tenho preco’
instead. Sincerely…
And if the entire World agrees that Arts should be preserved with the freedom it currently
has got, which still produces impairment of creativity sometimes, as these days, with lots
of things repeating, instead of being created, then we really do not want that push towards
human communication.
What should tell the extraordinary difference between human beings who are normal and
machines is obviously the amount of possible original reasoning deriving from them. In
therefore working mostly on the reaction side of things, while the human being would be
Just for starters, the human being will always be necessary to program a machine, unless
evolution in them is stopped. Of course the creator would always be above the creation in
what regards machines, for it is necessary a human being, at least, to insert data in the
machine. Who determines the data to be inserted is obviously the logical reasoning of that
same human being. On the other hand, it is necessary to reason at least one level above
the creation in order to be able to create it, in the case of a non-self learner creation.
Therefore, one could think that the day the self-learning machine is created, human will
equate machines.
However, for that end, the human being has to fully understand their own mental
processes lying above the machine level, that is, in the highest levels of Bloom’s
taxonomy.
Such an understanding has not been reached by human beings yet and will obviously
never be, once new human beings are always being born and there is no way we can tell
who has got the best mental analysis processes, for instance, in the World, or we can
predict that evolution will be stopped by time x and no more blessed human beings than
those already computed will be born. This way, the chance for the machines reasoning to
overcome human beings’ reasoning, or even equate, even if one ever finds out how to
make machines hold all levels of reasoning in the Bloom’s taxonomy, is close to zero, in
what regards most objective share of human beings: their knowledge processes, decision
processes, etc.
Emotions, however, are definitely connected to what we could easily name ‘soul’, being
us people of faith or not. A machine cannot, possibly, hold soul. Therefore, even if willing
to defend the thesis that machines may, one day, replace human beings in terms of
processes which are passive of abstract representation, we cannot defend the thesis that
machines may replace human beings in their full complexity, therefore they cannot
The other point is that the machine to generate all other machines would have to be
created by a human being, therefore would be limited to that human being’s logical
system, and there is no way a human being could even know, at the same level, the
variety of humans attributed to God, in terms of their brains processes, even, and the
brains processes are infinitely more mechanizeable than the rest of the human functions
hypothesis that machines will, some day, be the same as human beings. They may get
close to that, but will never be the same, and that is very simple to prove logically, as just
done. Of course we talk about the hypothesis that at least a number of human beings,
superior or equal to one, is not slaved, or made abnormal, or more limited, artificially,
that is, in the hypothesis that there are normal human beings left in human kind and
Not surprisingly, if every single human being is inserted a biotech and criminally
impaired, or modified, in their scope of possibilities on Earth, then machines may, finally,
equate them. However, as stated many times in the case of the trials of solutions to the
Sorites, that would modify the original problem, therefore just making a solution to it
All the above statements confirm, once more, that there is more to HNR than what is
involved in Computer ‘Science’ or Mathematics. Thus, it has to be the case that a Pure
1. The Sorites is above the machine and the mathematical logic levels (not reasoning,
entirely inside of it, so that there is really no point in insisting that the Sorites were
ever a Classical Logic problem. It might hold a reduced part of it - the final
decision, at most - in the Classical (or passive of expression via such) Logic, once
all human reasoning demanded by it is for deciding between NO and YES, classical
to the query of the presenter of the Sorites, if we ever want to solve the problem the
7.1 Discussion:
We assume that we have already proved that the Sorites is located above the level of both
Mathematics and Classical Logic. Therefore, our discussion here should focus on the
The presenter of the Sorites has been nicknamed ‘Cartesian Inquisitor’ by us precisely
because his questions are always of the sort ‘yes’ or ‘no’ (do we still have a heap? Is it
still red?). Of course we write about their expectation of answer, what does not
necessarily imply the audience will make him happy with their behavior, that is, someone
in the audience may simply say ‘I don’t care, go to hell!’, for instance. Can they say so?
Obviously they can. Is that acceptable as part of the game? Yes, it is, as argued before,
people may say whatever they like in this World, thanks God, as long as the society is a
democratic one. However, the Inquisitor ALSO has got rights to expect a ‘yes’ or ‘no’,
and will get frustrated if not getting them from the audience. In such a case, once their
mental setup is only for ‘yes’ or ‘no’, the presenter will need a strategy to collect only
‘yes’ or ‘no’ from every person producing utterances in the audience, or stating even
nothing. The surprise of the language game is obviously this: How can we state it is
possible to translate even silence into ‘yes’ or ‘no’ in a democratic society? Would that
not be dictatorship instead? This is the basic problem with any translation interface so far:
People have accused them all from suffering of absence of universal acceptance of their
decision theory. They find it hard to accept the proposed translation interfaces as natural
events, rather than seeing them all as pure imposition. Some are accused of gaps in the
translation time, others are accused of gluts, and others are yet accused of vagueness of
criteria of translation. The point here, however, is defending that the problem actually
resumes to finding a translation interface between human expression and the expected
sort of answers by the presenter (‘yes’ or ‘no`). This point seems to be settled. Notice that
such a decision theory is above the machine level, in the highest levels of Bloom’s
taxonomy, and that is what is necessary to solve the Sorites problem, therefore proving its
solution cannot lie inside of any computer sort of logic, what will include Mathematics.
1. The Sorites solution can only be written by someone working on the same mental
level as the linguists. Ultimately, the own Inquisitor has to play the role of the
linguists.
8.1 Discussion:
The solution to the Sorites is located in the area which belongs exclusively to the
person proposing the problem is one of the sort ‘yes’ or ‘no’, which are answers from the
Classical Logic system. Therefore, there must be a ‘forced’ sort of translation from one
The issues of the Sorites seem to be the same faced by every lexicon expert: The trial of
making speech and thought something with a common, generically accepted, symbolic
Therefore, in the Sorites, one must proceed like the linguist would, and simply apply their
techniques to solve the problem. The same way the dictionary writers do, we should do in
order to make something very large, different for each person, converge to something
everyone will accept as true. Notice that the elements forming the Sorites are precisely
the same ones involved in the lexicon creation (human beings’ expression, human beings’
mental reference, and forced judgment, imposed by the linguist, over the symbolic pieces
of the language).
The issues raised by the Cartesian Inquisitor are actually about the own definition of the
predicate terms involved (where they start/where they end, bounds of definition, or scope
of the definitions, or even limits of the object (Russel)). Besides, from an audience
member’s perspective, there is no problem: they say or do whatever they wish, the
Inquisitor being the one with an actual problem, obviously belonging also, on top, to their
Obviously the case that the Inquisitor is in the same position as any linguist, and would
have the same options to choose from when determining that particular audience has
‘allowed` them to apply ‘red’ for instance, not considering him an illogical person, or
non-scientific, to object X, or not to apply it, for instance. Notice that the problem
extrapolates Science: It is actually about whether the audience agrees with own
classical options which confine the human world to the absolute, that is, to right or
wrong. Of course, as written before, any person may use ‘red’ at their own discretion, and
it has to be ‘right’, not mattering what they do with it, even pointing to black and stating
‘red’…
The fact that the Inquisitor has got such a proposal places them on the level of ‘freaks’, or
abnormal scientific beings already, by default, for they themselves can do whatever they
like with ‘red’ or even ‘heap’. However, in supposing they are interested in a democratic
voting to, for instance, check their sanity, or scientific level, they would have to know
how the linguists work, for Science must advance, not regress, to then do as they do,
otherwise becoming a linguist themselves and producing changes to the decision theories
already in place. As most basic item, and scientific requirement, for the proposal of words
for lexicon definitions, in doubt the linguist shall not accept ‘red’ to include that nuance,
or ‘heap’ to mean that amount of grains. Therefore, if the linguist interprets the outcome
produced by the audience to mean they are in doubt, it is a ‘no’, doubts meaning
everything which is not any of the expected answers, as for the Inquisitor.
3. Conclusion
This paper brings a summary of statements either implied or read clearly from our
We also further prove we hold both a definite solution to the Sorites and a situation of
4. Note
Note 1 Notice the difference, for us, between the set of all possible logical events,
Logic, and a machine-friendly event bearing logical structure, logic. For example:
5. References
[1] Pinheiro, M.R. A Solution to the Sorites Paradox. Semiotica, 160 (1/4), 2006.
[2] Read, S. Thinking about Logic: an introduction to the philosophy of logic. Oxford
University Press. 1995. Oxford.