Quoted message said:Quoted message said:That's a famous principle (they call it a "law"😉 of
dialectical materialism (i.e. Marxism). It's called
the "passing of quantity into quality". At some point
when you have enough quantity, it becomes transformed
into a quality of its own. <<
COMMENT:
It is indeed famous, but the passing of mere "quantity" into an
emergent "qualilty" (how many grains of sand does it take to make a
"heap", etc) was known to the Greeks as the Sorites (Gk for "heap"😉
paradox. Its restatement by Hegel is where Marx got it. Credit where
credit is due.
And of course the sorites or "slipery slope" problem is with us always.
The fuzzy logic people have recently gotten interested in it. But the
basic problem is that we often need to make binary decisions in a
continuum world. How do we do that? The answers are almost always
unsatisfactory. Usually people try to construct some tradeoff function
which is maximized as a quantity changes, and then use the extremal as
their marker. But there's always argument about how to do the tradeoff
weighting in the function.
Examples:
How much freedom do you give up for a certain amount of security?
Obviously only a fool wouldn't give up any. Obviously only a fool would
give up all of it. In the middle is a grey scale with no bright lines.
And that's one of a hundred political, scientific, and other such
problems in life. One cell isn't a baby. Two cells isn't a baby. Four
cells is not. But at some point, half a trillion cells certainly is.
So ...... sorites.
Sorites, by the way, is pronouced as in the following limerick I wrote
years ago:
The champ paradox called "sorites"
The ancients thought one of the sweeties.
If Greek paradoxes
Sold cereal boxes
They would have had this one on Wheaties.
SBH
