u/bark_birch_

A recent attempt to list ten favourite Bean moments prompted me to embark on a relisten, as the comments reminded me of many enjoyable Bean nuggets I wished to savour once more. While revisiting early Bean content, I have decided to start noting down the moments where the veil between Henry's rather mystical thought process and the history of ideas grows thin and porous. I feel that in previous centuries, he could have made a name for himself as a Diogenes-style figure: perhaps living in a barrel and making saucy comments to Alexander the Great.

My first example:

In 'Going to Disney World And Not Wanting To Be Dressed Up As A Ruffian', Henry sets up the following thought experiment:

"Picture a plate... on that plate, imagine a metal hand... Imagine that the arm of the metal hand is offscreen, so you don't know whether it's attached to a person, or it could be the Pope, or it could be anything. That's not what you're worried about. It's a simple metal hand, or claw. It's holding a piece of lettuce. It releases, and the lettuce falls onto the plate. The hand retracts. [Sinister robotic noise.] The hand is back. It's now holding half of a cucumber slice. It releases that and the cucumber falls. It comes back again. Now it releases a cherry tomato. Cut to half an hour later. There's a salad niçoise on that plate. At what point did it become a salad?"

Here, Henry appears to be an earthly vessel for the spirit of the 4th century philosopher Eubulides, who is first credited with the formulation of the sorites paradox. In short, the paradox can be summarised as follows:

• Imagine a philosopher [metal hand] and an impartial observer.
• The philosopher picks up one grain of sand [a piece of lettuce] and deposits it on the ground.
• The philosopher asks the impartial observer, "Is this a heap of sand?" [Is this a salad?] The observer replies that it is not.
• The philosopher repeats this with a second grain of sand [or slice of cucumber] and asks the same question. The observer replies again that it is not a heap of sand.
• By the end of the day, there is a heap of sand [or fully-formed salad] on the ground, and the observer is replying "Yes." At what point do the grains of sand form a heap?

As I understand it, there are generally thought to be three ways of framing this paradox: it either reveals vagueness in language, conceptual vagueness, or vagueness in reality itself (or so my professor framed the issue approximately 20 years ago in a lecture on the subject - my memory of this is undoubtedly not to be trusted). However, the consequences of introducing the conceit of a niçoise are yet to be seen, and probably mean the whole thing has to be considered anew with the aid of a purpose-built robo-lab.