The sorites paradox originates from Ancient Greek: soreites, (heaped up.) The meaning of a heap (and its conglomerate synonyms) can be ontologically paradoxical, for such abstract nouns predicatively vague. Consider a heap of sand, from which grains are individually removed. Is it still a heap when only one grain remains? If not, when did it change from a heap to a non-heap? The Sorites Paradox scared Heidegger out of his wits, for he steered a cowardly course well clear of nominalism for obvious reasons.

Various people may decide that one grain of sand on its own is not a heap but a large assembly of grains of sand is a heap. Heidegger neglects the Aristotelian notions of many", other, unequal and unlike.  Heidegger's notion of ontological difference ignores the problems of Aristotle's Form-Series of one, same, equal, and similar.

As Prof. Douglas R. points out:

My position regarding the so-called sorites paradox, or better still the questions it poses, are part of my nominalist mereological position, whereby I cognise of abstractions like collections and heaps and piles and clouds, etc., as non-existent, in that it is the individuate particles that exist, and it is only the existential spatial  location of that contiguous mass which we humans [conveniently] ignore and denote with a collective noun.

Transcendentalist responses such as:

Such a response is not a nominalist concern. Of COURSE it is more convenient to call collections of objects with a single name -  that's why we do it. Any concern  on the part of most nominalists entails the fact that useful fictions are often believed to be facts.

The limitations, sociology, conventions and useful fictions of human communication is not what is being addressed here at all.  What is being discussed is the ontological facts of the matter. The nominalist interest is in what actually exists and what does not exist. There is no agenda which includes eradicating or decimating the linguistic conveniences that have developed over millennia in order to render human communication better suited to speed, or the curtailment of of unnecessary periphrasis. The nominalist agenda is educative - not eliminative.

What actually exists?

1. The actual grains of sand that can be seen by the fingers and felt upon the epidermal sensors and sensed by the human holism?

2. The significatum or label which signals a collection of such entities?

Of course this all ties up with the concept of signification and nomination in general, and extends to the way in which we denote individual grains of sand themselves and any other multiplicity of objects in the world including (as Parmenides pointed out) the very stars that make up the cosmos.

We can look up at the majesty of the heavens and pick out well-known individuate planets and stars or we can metaphorically adjust our focus - widen our lens and see the Milky Way as one object (Parmenides The One.) To do so is a neurological convenience - a useful cognitive fiction. And so it must remain until cosmologists can convince us the the whole of what exists is one huge object bereft of spatial interstices. Thus we ontologically  toggle between individuates and conglomerates.

What is involved [and treasured by Platonists] is the notion of vagueness [so beloved of transcendentalists] Such traditional  denominational fuzziness as promulgated by our institutions of education, the media and the church   is to a large extent accepted by the people in the street unquestionably.

It is only when the little by little example or experience of the incremental growth of collections comes into play, i. e., identifying the precise moment at which a certain number of individuate grains become a heap that the abstractive concept of suddenly seems to be illuminated in our minds.

The nouns employed such as cloud, heap, pile, stack, rick, collection, aggregation, accumulation, etc., can also be universally applied to a myriad of different entities, which further complicates the ontology of collectives. This consideration of piles of sand may seem very much an esoteric waste of time comparable with examining ones own bellybutton - but such is not the case. The ramifications for philosophy are tremendous, for universals and properties and essences, etc., are the very underpinning upon which religion, transcendentalist beliefs and so-called continental philosophy are founded.

Another approach is to use a multi-valued logic. The problem is with the principle of bivalence: the sand, the bricks, the bottles is either a heap or is not a heap, without any ontological shades of grey. Instead of two logical states, heap and not- heap.

Perhaps surprisingly, the way I see it language per se  doesn't exist - only the human lingual holism (the enbrained body) exists. There is no gradually accumulating: heap of language, but rather a developing holism able to extend more elaborate neurological connections, networks and systems in order to stimulate and create an increasing complexity of meaningful noises in the laryngeal area, and to exist in states of neurophysical purposefulness, with which it attributes specific noises as indicating certain entities in its environment, and other noises which help in commenting upon or describing the activity of passivity of those entities with which we share our world..

In other words the abstraction language is one of the ways [very important ways] in which humans exist, and as human beings develop and change the ways in which they exist the meaningful noises they emit change [in their significance and complexity] too. To a nominalist  therefore the sorites paradox is not a paradox at all, but simply an illustration of ontological error.  A vocabulary does not actually exist in relation to the question of at what point proto-communication (the grunts of a caveman) can described as a language, for what is taking place is not some incremental addition to a descripto-nominological heap of language, (significata) but changes in the vocally empowered human holism in the way it exists.

This general nominalist observation can be extended to the whole cosmos in relation to the primitive human concepts of beginnings and ends. Just as language doesnt begin at some particular stage in human development, when it is deemed that sufficient words have accumulated in the  nominological heap to allow latter-day anthropologists to judge the collection worthy of the sobriquet; language - so in a similar way, that which exists in what we call the cosmos had no beginning, and will have no end, for what is happening is individuate entitic CHANGE - not cosmic accrual or depletion [when sufficient matter is calculated or heaped to be called a cosmos] neither does the cosmos have an end where the material decreases to such a stage is reached that it no longer qualifies according to the judgement of the human brain, which pronounces material insufficiency, Of course I too have veered off into the wild blue yonder of metaphysics for patently no such humans would be around to do anything at all when the last stages of cosmic implosion and explosive renewal were immanent.

Of course like all things abstractional it is far easier to speak of cosmic change - but the sociology of convenient human behaviour is NOT what I am discussing -  I am not attempting to describes communicative human behaviourism, I am addressing what EXISTS and what DOESNT EXIST.

The fact that humans think in these old-fashioned ways is understandable, for since we became thinking beings we have observed an unceasing process of apparent (phenomenological) beginnings and ends. Day dawns and the day begins - night falls and day ends. A child is born and begins its life - the man dies and ends and animation ceases. It is only natural that amongst primitives it will appear that there is a beginning and an end to everything - within the parameters of their own insignificant lives [which TO THEM are extremely significant. What is missed is the fact of the matter - beginnings and ends are an illusion - what is in fact happening is a constant change in the ways that entities exist and the mereological entiatic impingements of matergic objects that form, coalesce  and disperse.

Because one of the conditions of organic change is the eventual degradation of the constitutive community as far as humans are concerned it results in a termination of any awareness of the environment [a state which humans call death] Now this event [whilst very dramatic for humans] is just another instance of the change which is the engine of the way that which exists exists. So what is the engine of CHANGE?  

For me the engine of change, the existential imperative,  is the dissipation and renewal of energised material. Such changing existential states are in some way connected with the nature of the mereological combinations in which they sometimes exist as they join and eventually  leave these communities. I think that the eternal process of accumulation of parts that eventually  produces  life until there is something which we humans call life is an example of this mereological barn-dance of coming together and splitting up.

Design is not necessary and these processes can be explained as entities coming together in the easiest ways possible i.e. - those ways which result in the most minimum matergic loss or conversely associating in ways which result in the most matergic gain [nuclear explosions, etc.]

An interferring Deus ex Machina would only mess-up a perfectly natural process. Creation ex Nihilo? Forget it! Nothingness is impossible - Heideggerian juvenilia. Mereological complexity exists, has always existed and will always exist. There was never any job for a God to do - no ontological job vacancy exists for any of the gods and godlets of humankind.

I conceive of life as simply an existential modality of the mereological conglomerate that we call the human holism. The perfectly natural processes of action and interaction which take place between the members of this community of the highest primates. For me the existential state which we call life is an inevitable result of the energetic relationships that take place within certain mereologies in a given physical environment [optimal distance from the sun, etc.] The fact that human organisms have developed to such a stage where they exist in communicative states and modes which allow inter-human colloquy  is no more awe-inspiring that the mechanisms of the smallest organic particle of which the human is the macro-mereological manifestation.

The individuate members of the human race may be thought of as parts in a mereological swarm. How many humans does it need to make a crowd, etc?

Yes, I have my nominalist agenda after all and I admit it. The nominological nets we cast upon the world reflect  our own position our concerns, needs and ontological commitment.

I have always needed a position - it hurts my butt to sit on a onto-philosophical fence.

References.
1. McGaughey. Douglas R. Heideggers Ontological Difference in Light of Aristotles Dynamis and Energeia Some Theological Implications. http://www.chora-strangers.org/files/chora/mcgaughey_1998.pdf