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posted by on Wednesday February 22 2017, @02:36PM   Printer-friendly
from the schrödinger's-cake dept.

It's a delicious structure consisting of a small sponge with a chocolate cap covering a veneer of orange jelly. It is arguably Britain's greatest invention after the steam engine and the light bulb. But is a Jaffa Cake actually a biscuit, asks David Edmonds.

This question reheats a confectionery conundrum first raised in 1991. A tax is charged on chocolate-covered biscuits, but not on cakes. The manufacturer, McVities, had always categorised them as cakes and to boost their revenue the tax authorities wanted them recategorised as biscuits.

A legal case was fought in front of a brilliant adjudicator, Mr D C Potter. For McVities, this produced a sweet result. The Jaffa Cake has both cake-like qualities and biscuit-like qualities, but Mr Potter's verdict was that, on balance, a Jaffa Cake is a cake.

[...] We are tempted to think that every concept must have a strict definition to be useable. But Wittgenstein pointed out that there are many "family-resemblance" concepts, as he called them. Family members can look alike without sharing a single characteristic. Some might have distinctive cheek bones, others a prominent nose, etc. Equally, some concepts can operate with overlapping similarities. Take the concept of "game". Some games involve a ball, some don't. Some involve teams, some don't. Some are competitive, some are not. There is no characteristic that all games have in common.

And there is no strict definition of "cake" or "biscuit" that compels us to place the Jaffa Cake under either category.

Another temptation is to believe that all that is at stake here is an arbitrary issue of semantics. It is, the thought goes, a mere verbal convention whether one labels a Jaffa Cake a cake or a biscuit. It has nothing to do with the real world.

The distinction between statements that are true as a matter of convention or language ("All triangles have three sides"), and those that make a claim about the empirical world ("It is possible to eat 13 Jaffa Cakes in a minute") - is a longstanding one in philosophy. But in the middle of the last century the American philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine disputed whether such a rigid distinction could be maintained - and Tim Crane agrees with him that it cannot.

What say you, soylentils? Is it a cake or a biscuit? Is it both or neither?

Source:

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-38985820


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by quacking duck on Wednesday February 22 2017, @03:04PM

    by quacking duck (1395) on Wednesday February 22 2017, @03:04PM (#470197)

    As I read the summary all I could think of was the debate over whether Pluto was a planet or not. Incredibly, I scroll down and that very debate is the story right before this one.

    And just like in this story, someone questioned why people were bothering with the classification one way or the other in the first place.

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  • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 22 2017, @04:33PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 22 2017, @04:33PM (#470260)

    So it can be taxed. thats the whole point. didn't you understand this?