DELIA GRAFF

FARA
She  philosophized  about  vagueness  —  and  lived  with  it  too.  

B Y   J A M E S   R Y E R S O N

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Tackling a paradox: Fara in 2004. CreditSteve Pyke

The “paradox of the heap” seems at first like a trick, a brainteaser that must
have some clever catch. But it reveals itself, as it defies easy understanding, to
be a philosophical problem. You might approach it as a puzzle, only to end up
devising a solution so deep that it would challenge our thinking about
language, knowledge and the nature of reality. By the time of her death from
brain cancer in July at 48, Delia Graff Fara, a philosopher at Princeton, had
done just that.

Start with a heap of sand. If you remove a single grain, it remains a heap.
Repeat this process enough times, however, and you have a heap of sand that
contains, say, one grain. This is absurd: One grain is not a heap. Something
has gone wrong, but it is not obvious what. Either there is a precise number of
grains at which point a heap becomes a nonheap, or there is no such thing as a
heap, or classical logic is flawed (perhaps it is only ever sort of true that
something is a heap). Which bullet to bite?

This paradox, which originated with the ancient Greeks, is troubling because it
is ubiquitous. It applies not just to being a heap but also to being tall, or red,
or bald, or soft — or any other gradient-like property. When Fara began
working on this paradox as a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology in the 1990s, philosophers had come to view it as an instance of
a larger problem: vagueness. We want to take seriously our talk of hot and
cold weather, bald and full-haired men, day and night, but the boundaries that
distinguish such things can seem blurry to the point of incoherence.
YOU  MIGHT  APPROACH  IT  AS  A  PUZZLE,  ONLY  TO  END  UP  DEVISING  A  
SOLUTION  SO  DEEP  THAT  IT  WOULD  CHALLENGE  OUR  THINKING  ABOUT  
LANGUAGE,  KNOWLEDGE  AND  THE  NATURE  OF  REALITY.  

Fara was unsatisfied with the solutions on offer. Some philosophers argued
that vagueness was a form of ignorance: that there is a precise number of
grains separating a heap from a nonheap, but we don’t know what it is. Others
argued that vagueness was a result of semantic indecision: that there are lots
of possible things we could mean by “heap,” each of which would establish a
precise number of grains for heap-hood, but we haven’t taken the trouble to
specify that meaning. Still others, looking to avoid a sharp distinction between
heaps and nonheaps, sought to develop nonclassical or “fuzzy” logics, which
experimented with degrees of truth.

These solutions were advanced with argumentative ingenuity and technical

sophistication, often in ways that minimized their oddities. But Fara, herself a
skilled practitioner of logic and formal semantics, was looking for a solution
that addressed a common-sense question: If there is a precise point at which a
heap becomes a nonheap — and unless you want to abandon natural language
or classical logic, it seems there must be — why are we so inclined to think
otherwise?

Fara’s theory, which she presented in a 2000 paper called “Shifting Sands,”
had an answer. She argued that vagueness was an expression of our ever-
changing purposes: that there is a precise point at which a heap becomes a
nonheap, but it “shifts around” as our objectives do. In fact, because the act of
considering two comparable heaps accentuates their similarity, “the boundary
can never be where we are looking.” No wonder we think it doesn’t exist.

Imagine that a gym teacher has hastily divided a large class of students into
two groups according to height. If you enter the gym, you will have no trouble
declaring one group the tall students and the other the short ones. But had you
been presented with the undivided class and asked to say where the tallness
boundary was, you would have despaired of an answer. Tallness is not just a
matter of height, Fara concluded. As with all such properties, what gets to be
tall is also shaped by our interests at a given moment.

“Shifting Sands” became an influential and highly cited paper, not least
because it had implications for other areas of philosophy. It was also notable
for being written by a young woman in a field that skews heavily toward men,
both demographically and in terms of works cited. Concerned about such
imbalances, Fara devoted considerable effort to helping women in the
profession.

When it came to racial diversity, an area in which philosophy is similarly

lopsided, Fara was also a champion, if more circumspect. Her mother, who
raised Fara as a single parent in New York, was African-American; her father,
who died when she was a child, was of Irish and Jewish descent. Because of
her appearance, Fara was often assumed to be white or queried clumsily about
where she was “from.” She told her husband she hoped to avoid being defined
by her race. But as much as she let misperceptions slide, or answered politely
that she was “born in Queens,” it was an issue she could never fully escape.

At the end of her life, Fara became interested in the philosophy of race. She
wondered if her ideas about vagueness — about how seemingly independent
properties of the world are infused with human interests — might be relevant.
It would have been more blurry boundaries to think about.
James  Ryerson  is  a  senior  staff  editor  for  The  Times’s  Op-­Ed  page  and  the  Ivory  Tower  columnist  
for  the  Book  Review.