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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, Informative) by UncleSlacky on Wednesday February 22 2017, @07:13PM

    by UncleSlacky (2859) on Wednesday February 22 2017, @07:13PM (#470357)

    Joseph Swan don't real.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Swan#Electric_light [wikipedia.org]

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  • (Score: 1, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 22 2017, @07:53PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 22 2017, @07:53PM (#470382)

    Inventions are only ideas if they don't work. Thomas Edison made it work. Although he was good at taking credit for others work. He created the model modern corporations use today to steal IP from smart people to give the financial rewards to those who aren't smart enough to do the actual innovation.

    • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday February 22 2017, @09:31PM

      by maxwell demon (1608) on Wednesday February 22 2017, @09:31PM (#470432) Journal

      Inventions are only ideas if they don't work.

      From the linked Wikipedia article:

      By 1860 he was able to demonstrate a working device

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 23 2017, @12:58AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 23 2017, @12:58AM (#470539)

        Those had such a short service life that you had better buy them by the dozen.
        You'll need to keep a kerosene lamp around as well, otherwise you'll be waiting till sunrise to replace the Swan bulb that just burned out.

        Incandescent bulbs didn't really get to be practical [wikipedia.org] until tungsten (Just and Hanaman, 1904), "ductile tungsten" (Coolidge, 1906), and argon (Langmuir, 1913).

        -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]

        • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday February 23 2017, @05:09AM

          by maxwell demon (1608) on Thursday February 23 2017, @05:09AM (#470606) Journal

          Working and working well are two different concepts.

          --
          The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 22 2017, @09:10PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 22 2017, @09:10PM (#470427)

    In addressing the question of who invented the incandescent lamp, historians Robert Friedel and Paul Israel[8] list 22 inventors of incandescent lamps prior to Joseph Swan and Thomas Edison. They conclude that Edison's version was able to outstrip the others because of a combination of three factors: an effective incandescent material, a higher vacuum than others were able to achieve (by use of the Sprengel pump) and a high resistance that made power distribution from a centralized source economically viable.

    Edison gets to claim the first practical, marketable light bulb. Swan doesnt get to claim lightbulbs at all. 22 other prior inventors.

    In the list I see brits, scotch, Belgians, Americans.