Last week King Charles addressed the French Senate chamber and received a one-minute standing ovation for his speech. The French got rid of their monarchy with the aid of the guillotine in 1793. Our unelected sovereign, with no apparent sense of irony, lectured the gathered politicians of the Republic on the need to protect the world “from our most existential challenge of all: that of global warming, climate change, and the catastrophic destruction of nature”.
But did they realise that Charles had declined to travel by Eurostar? Instead, he had flown and had his private Bentley meet him at the airport. Despite Emmanuel Macron’s ban on short internal flights, Charles had then flown to Bordeaux – his justification was that this was necessary on security grounds.
Charles’s climate hypocrisy is well-known and embarrassing. That doesn’t invalidate his message though, which is true and important – hypocrisy reflects badly on the hypocrite, but not always on the argument. Charles is often right about the climate, though very far from a good role model with his immense carbon footprint. The French politicians largely chose to ignore his hypocrisy. The Evening Standard reported on their positive reaction, declaring Charles “the king of France”. This tickled many philosophers because it echoed a famous puzzle about the logic of language that had worried Bertrand Russell.
Russell’s concern was how to deal with sentences that didn’t seem to denote anything. His example was: “The present king of France is bald.” Russell was writing in 1905 when there hadn’t been a king of France for over a century. So, what was the logical status of that sentence? Was it true, false, or perhaps completely meaningless? It didn’t seem to be meaningless. Yet, if “the present king of France is bald” is false, logically it should follow that “the present king of France is not bald” is true. But that looks false too, because the set of non-bald people doesn’t include the present king of France. Logically a statement and its negation couldn’t both be false.
Russell found a workaround. He thought the underlying logical shape of the idea was something like this:
There exists something that is the present king of France
There is only one thing that is the present king of France
Anything that is the present king of France is bald
That got him off the hook because it brought out an ambiguity in the negation – it could mean either that there is no king of France or that there is one who is not bald. But there is another, far more important philosophical problem suggested by “the present king of France is bald”. It has worried philosophers for a long time – ever since Eubulides, one of Euclid’s pupils, came up with it in the 4th century BCE.
This is the Sorites Paradox. There are several ways of framing it. Here’s a popular one. At what point is it accurate to call someone losing their hair bald? If they have no hair, they’re bald. But what about someone like Charles, is he bald? Probably not yet. But when will he be bald? The paradox arises because losing hairs one at a time doesn’t make much difference, but at the same time it does. The problem arises for concepts that are vague and have fuzzy boundaries (not a reference to hair). Are we really going to say that at a certain point just one hair’s difference determines the issue?
The name “sorites” comes from the Greek for a heap. It’s used because of another famous example. If you have a heap of a million grains of sand, removing one grain doesn’t stop it being a heap. Keep removing them one by one, and you’ll still have a heap. Except at some point you won’t. The paradox arises because it seems that removing a single grain of sand both does and doesn’t make a difference to the question.
It really doesn’t matter whether Charles is bald or not. Who cares? But it does matter that we have a climate crisis. “Climate crisis”, like “bald” and “heap”, is a vague concept. One more super-hot summer, one more season of flooding, another degree of heat increase – alone each of these didn’t make a crisis and people can debate which changes are reversible, vital, temporary, and so on.
But we’re well over the fuzzy borderline now and are in a heap of trouble. It’s better to have Charles the hypocrite telling the truth about the climate than Rishi Sunak the short-termist reneging on pledges.
