10 - The Sorites Paradox in Philosophy of Logic

Summary

The Sorites Paradox is one of the most venerable and complex paradoxes in the territory of philosophy of logic. Together with the Sorites, the semantic paradoxes also occupy a very prominent place in research in this area. In this chapter we examine the relation between the Sorites and the best-known of the semantic paradoxes: the Liar Paradox. Traditionally, the Sorites and the Liar have been considered to be unrelated. Nevertheless, there have been several attempts to uniformly cope with them. This chapter begins by examining when and why in general, a uniform solution to more than one paradox should be expected and, in particular, why a uniform solution to the Liar and the Sorites should be expected. Subsequently the chpater focuses on the work of Paul Horwich, who has used epistemicist ideas that were first applied to solve the Sorites in order to attempt to give a solution to the Liar. It shows in some detail, as a particular example of the influence that the Sorites has had over the semantic paradoxes, whether the epistemicist approach Horwich presents in order to face the Sorites can be successfully applied to his theory of truth.