‘Is red’ and ‘looks the same’
phil 20229
Jeff Speaks
April 17, 2008
One especially interesting version of the sorites paradox is the one involving a
long series of color shades, each indistinguishable from the preceding one, but
which is such that the first is clearly distinguishable from the last.
That version of the paradox went like this:
1. Swatch 1 is red.
2. If swatch 1 is red, then swatch 2 is red.
3. If swatch 2 is red, then swatch 3 is red.
. . . . . .
C. Swatch 10,000 is red.
This argument seems like an especially hard to resist version of sorites reasoning,
since the sorites premise of this argument — for any objects x,y, if xlooks the
same as yand xis red, then yis red — seems especially attractive. How could
two objects be completely indistinguishable in respect of color, and yet one be
red and the other not?
This version of the sorites argument, unlike the others, also relies on an as-
sumption: the assumption that there could be a phenomenal continuum of color
patches such that the first is distinguishable in color from the last, and yet none
is distinguishable from the adjacent patch in the series. However, this assump-
tion clearly seems to be true — if we had a million color patches, couldn’t we
set up such a case?
We can also imagine sitting in front of a movie screen whose color is changing so
slowly from red to orange that you can never notice a change from one moment
to the next, and yet the initial color is clearly distinct from the final color.
(Or imagine waking up and watching your room get lighter and lighter, very
gradually.)
So it seems that there could be a million-patch long phenomenal continuum.
But could there be a phenomenal continuum of only 3 color patches? It might
seem not — it would be hard to come up with just 3 patches such that patch 1
