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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
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday February 22 2017, @03:11PM
Oh and by the way -- what kind of idiotic legislator enacted a regulation targeting "biscuits" without defining the term in the statute? Most well-drafted regulations contain a list of terminology and definitions to deal with this very type of situation. The judge shouldn't be contemplating the abstract nature of "biscuits" to resolve the issue; he should be able to refer to a legal definition in the regulation (which may or may not accord with the common use of the term).
(Score: 2) by NewNic on Wednesday February 22 2017, @07:19PM
The same type who defined rules for fruit and vegetables, leading to litigation over whether tomatoes are fruits or vegetables.
Incidentally, the thinking of the courts deciding these two cases appear to be diametrically opposed. In the UK case, the court looked at how Jaffa Cakes behave when allowed to go stale (a scientific test), ignoring how people eat them, while in the US case regarding tomatoes, the court ignored scientific evidence and based its decision on how tomatoes are prepared and eaten.
lib·er·tar·i·an·ism ˌlibərˈterēənizəm/ noun: Magical thinking that useful idiots mistake for serious political theory