The Sorites paradox goes like this: If you have a heap of sand and remove one grain, you still have a heap. Remove another grain - still a heap. But keep going and eventually you're left with a single grain, which clearly isn't a heap. So when exactly did it stop being a heap? Which single grain made the difference?
Philosophers have proposed elaborate solutions for thousands of years: fuzzy logic, contextualism, epistemicism (the view that there is a precise boundary but we can't know it). They've written thousands of pages analyzing vagueness, tolerance principles, and semantic indeterminacy.
But I think they're all solving the wrong problem.
The idea of a "heap" was never a precise concept to begin with.
It's not that "heap" is a vague version of something precise. It's not that we lack the tools to determine the exact boundary. It's that "heap" is a man-made linguistic convenience that was never meant to have sharp boundaries. It's a casual descriptor, like "nearby" or "tallish" or "a bunch."
Even God doesn't know the answer to when a pile becomes a heap - not because God lacks knowledge, but because there's no fact of the matter to know. The question is malformed. It's like asking "What is the exact wavelength of the color 'reddish'?" The imprecision is intrinsic to the concept itself.
The Sorites paradox commits a category error: it treats "heap" as if it belongs to the same category as "52 centimeters high" or "exactly 1,000 grains." One is a measurement; the other is a rough descriptor. They're not the same kind of thing, and demanding that "heap" have the precision of a measurement is simply confused.
This got me thinking about what seems like a similar question in Jewish law: When does nightfall occur? When is Shabbat over?
The traditional criterion is "when you can see three medium stars." But this isn't well-formed either—different people have different eyesight, humidity affects visibility, light pollution interferes. So isn't this just another Sorites paradox, where a continuous function must be defined with precision?
No. And the difference is profound.
The rabbis using the "three stars" criterion aren't claiming that to be the definition of nightfall. They know there is a precise moment when day becomes night - a split second where one side is day and the other is night. God knows that moment exactly. The rabbis are simply trying to approximate it with the best human tools available, erring on the side of caution. (Nowadays, when we have clocks, they say "X number of minutes after sunset," but the idea is the same.)
They're not saying "nightfall is when we see three stars." They're saying "we use three stars as our best human estimate for something God knows with absolute precision."
The "three stars" criterion openly acknowledges its own status as an approximation. It's epistemically humble.
And this, I believe, reveals something fundamental about the difference between Greek and Jewish philosophical traditions.
Greek philosophy often assumes humans can achieve perfect knowledge through reason. When faced with "heap," instead of saying "this is a casual descriptor that doesn't need precision," Greek philosophy assumes there must be a precise answer and tortures itself trying to find it.
This is hubris disguised as intellectual rigor.
Jewish philosophy, by contrast, has humility baked into its architecture. Concepts like safek (doubt), teiku (leaving questions unresolved until Messianic times), and lo bashamayim hee (it's up to fallible humans to apply Torah rules) all encode the assumption that human knowledge is always incomplete.
The Talmud is filled with stories of great rabbis learning wisdom from their wives, children, slaves, and non-Jews. Pirkei Avot asks: "Who is wise? One who learns from all people." Moses was the greatest prophet precisely because he was the most humble.
As I've written before, rabbinic humility isn't about low self-esteem - it's about accurate self-location in a world inhabited by infinite divine intelligence. The rabbis were humble because they had constant awareness that compared to God, the difference between their own intelligence and that of a shoemaker is infinitesimal.
Secular philosophers, on the other hand, keep thinking that reason will answer everything and that they are on the cusp of finally understanding the world fully. They have been on this cusp for centuries, and new riddles keep arising. Yet their misplaced confidence remains.
The very act of treating "heap" as something that should have a precise definition reflects intellectual hubris. It assumes that:
- Human language should map perfectly onto reality
- Precision is always achievable and desirable
- We can and should resolve all ambiguity
- Every concept must have sharp boundaries
But why? Who said "heap" needs to be precise? It serves its communicative purpose perfectly well as a fuzzy descriptor. The only reason it becomes problematic is when philosophers insist it must mean something precise, then tie themselves in knots when they can't make it work.
The paradox is self-inflicted.
Some of history's worst moral wrongs came not from ethical confusion, but from ethical certainty without humility. Communism is confident that it had figured out the laws of history. Eugenics is certain about human improvement. Each assumed it had achieved complete understanding when in fact it had made fundamental errors.
Without humility, theory and practice are identical. If you believe you have certain knowledge of definitions and categories, you can simply apply them mechanically.
With humility, theory and practice diverge dramatically. When you acknowledge you're working with approximations, you must constantly test, adapt, remain open to being wrong, and build in safeguards for uncertainty. This is the essence of practice.
Greek philosophy is often about achieving theoretical perfection. Jewish philosophy is about navigating practical reality while acknowledging our profound limitations.
The Sorites paradox reveals philosophers who have mislocated themselves -assuming they have the capacity and obligation to make every concept precise, when sometimes the appropriate response is simply: "This word serves its purpose without precision, and that's fine."
Philosophy has spent two millennia on the Sorites paradox because it refuses to accept that some of our words are just... casual descriptors. That not everything needs to be made precise. That sometimes "close enough" isn't a philosophical failure -it's the appropriate level of specification.
Jewish ethics has this humility built in. Don't throw out an answer with absolute confidence -there can always be additional factors we're unaware of. The architecture of Jewish reasoning includes epistemic humility as a load-bearing beam, not decorative trim.
The assumption that human reason should be able to make all concepts precise is itself a kind of hubris. And recognizing its limits isn't intellectual defeat.
It's wisdom.
Thursday, October 09, 2025
Elder of Ziyon
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