Piece by piece
When is a thing no longer the thing it was?
I can think of two instances of today's problem which I can take from my own life. I once had a bike. One day as I was passing Downing College, something gave way. The frame had sheared through and I had to get a new frame. In fact, I had to get so much of that bike replaced that by the end only peripheral items remained from the original which meant that by and large it really was no longer the bike I'd bought.
The same was roughly true of my first PC. Apart from the tower case, the modem, and the sound card, the thing that got stolen by some bastard, son-of-a-bitch removal firm employee was not the machine I'd bought.
This is known as the Sorites Problem and, like yesterday, is about gradience (which is a word; I've declared it to be so). It's all about the point at which someone is officially bald, or when you have enough grains for a heap of sand. There are a lot of things about which we have fuzzy notions because they themselves have no clear points of demarcation. Although we talk about Old English, Middle English, and Modern English, there's really no definite point at which one became the other, although we can say that the English of the 1470s was definitely different from the English of the 1570s, but there's no exact boundary between these two points where the language of the former period became that of the latter.
I can think of two instances of today's problem which I can take from my own life. I once had a bike. One day as I was passing Downing College, something gave way. The frame had sheared through and I had to get a new frame. In fact, I had to get so much of that bike replaced that by the end only peripheral items remained from the original which meant that by and large it really was no longer the bike I'd bought.
The same was roughly true of my first PC. Apart from the tower case, the modem, and the sound card, the thing that got stolen by some bastard, son-of-a-bitch removal firm employee was not the machine I'd bought.
This is known as the Sorites Problem and, like yesterday, is about gradience (which is a word; I've declared it to be so). It's all about the point at which someone is officially bald, or when you have enough grains for a heap of sand. There are a lot of things about which we have fuzzy notions because they themselves have no clear points of demarcation. Although we talk about Old English, Middle English, and Modern English, there's really no definite point at which one became the other, although we can say that the English of the 1470s was definitely different from the English of the 1570s, but there's no exact boundary between these two points where the language of the former period became that of the latter.
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