bongo fury

No, but I think when people are inspired to declare that a single grain is absolutely not a heap, they mean it is a safe distance outside the range of...

Which will be all the time, then, because our usage of heap quite clearly appeals to numerical comparisons to decide cases, and withholds the term fro...

Except that you do want your conversation/discourse to withstand the pressure of logical clarification. The puzzle suggests that any clarification ren...

Not sure about that. If it at least means we agree that vague words are useful in all their vagueness, then cool. But does your conception of vaguenes...

And very often (any slippery slope ethical dilemma, any artistic play with discrete perceptual categories, e.g. musical pitches), you want to work wit...

But otherwise, we can use it as it is. With certain embarrassing difficulties on slippery slopes, admittedly.

Which, when you want to know about usage, is what you want to know. And, otherwise of course, not. But I am interested in usage, so I am.

Any "slippery slope" issue. ... is where, at any rate, 'a heap of sand' has seemed a pertinent analogy.

By "threshold" I hoped to refer to what you were calling a "private definition of heap". E.g., GMBA's 4-grains-or-more. From their observations about ...

But what about the big picture, a poll of judgements, or of individual thresholds? What if the tail end of such a distribution (of thresholds) reaches...