Free-Speech Crushing Meets The Sorites Paradox

Over Thanksgiving break, the 600 or so copies of the Yale Free Press distributed amongst the dining halls were stolen. I once wrote a "on the moral decline of the left"-style article for the YFP (how's that for neo-conservative credentials), so this hits a bit close to home.

Regardless of what you think of the magaine's politics, this is an assault on free speech and it is deplorable. Will Britt's reaction, however, is a triumph of understatement: "It's frustrating that the way of countering things that people don't like is to suppress them...We publish letters to the editor that put anyone who wants to in dialogue with the writers, so there's lots of space for people to disagree in a way that's more helpful."

The decidedly odd YDN report on the event (unintentionally) spelled out an instance of the Sorites paradox, which (for the uninitiated) is a millenia-old philosophical puzzle that still holds up. Take a look at this fantastic overview for more info.

An issue of the YFP costs nothing and is readily available in all the dining halls. Taking one issue is not only not stealing, but actively encouraged. Taking two? So much the better. Taking six hundred? Thief! Here are our conflicting intuitions cached out formally:

1) Grabbing one issue of the magazine is not stealing.

2) For any number n such that grabbing n issues is not stealing, grabbing n+1 issues is also not stealing.

3) Grabbing 600 issues is stealing.

Obviously one of those premises is wrong? But which one?!! And before you answer, bear in mind that every philosopher who has attempted to solve the problem of vagueness (of which Sorites is a vivid example) has failed spectacularly. The current going theory, called "epistemicism," argues that vagueness is just ignorance---in other words, all that's lacking to determine the fact of the matter in Sorites cases is information. I don't buy that, as you might have guessed, but I'll be damned if I can think of a better approach. [FYI, anyone who can think of a better approach is guaranteed a tenured chair at a philosophy department TBD--ed.]