It's WIP Week on Chromatic Conflux! I searched through my metaphorical blog post vault and found seven projects that I'm proud of — but may never "finish." So I thought, why not just publish them? Yesterday's post was "Behind the Scenes: Self-Publishing the Puzzles for Progress Book."
I started writing today's post in April 2022 in response to unproductive arguments about definitions. I fixed a typo and added an addendum. Enjoy!
Is a tomato a fruit? Is a hot dog a sandwich? Is cereal soup?
To answer these questions, I could have looked up the definitions of "fruit," "sandwich," and "soup," and then examined tomatoes, hot dogs, and cereal to see if they followed those definitions. I strongly considered doing just that. Everyone says that tomatoes are technically fruit, so I'd probably get yes for the first one. I'm not as sure about the other two.
Except that we all know the answer to those questions: no, no, and no.
If you asked me for fruit and I gave you a tomato, or if you asked me for a sandwich and I gave you a hot dog, or if you asked me for soup and I gave you cereal, you would be confused.
Why would you be confused? Because when we implicitly answer a question like "Is a tomato a fruit?" we don't keep a list of fruit criteria and check the tomato against them. Instead, prototype theory says that we compare tomatoes to prototypical fruits, to see if they can appear in the same contexts.
The prototypical fruit is probably an apple. At least, when I think about the concept "fruit," the apple jumps to my mind immediately. Apples are often eaten on their own. While it sometimes appears in savory food, apple is commonly featured in desserts: apple pie is iconic, and apple cake is also prevalent. Apple juice and apple cider are also very common.
It's a similar deal with other fruit. Bananas, berries, oranges, and grapes, to name a few, are often eaten on their own, and when they're in other dishes, those dishes are usually—though not always—sweet rather than savory.
I'm less sure what the prototypical vegetable is. Maybe a carrot? I feel like it should be green.
Let's look at the tomato. Tomatoes are not often eaten on their own. When in other dishes, those dishes are usually savory. Tomato is a staple ingredient in burgers, sandwiches, and salads; tomato sauce on pizza or with pasta; and of course there's tomato soup. It's true that people occasionally drink tomato juice, but tomato in a dessert is pretty rare. (Though I have not one but two videos of ketchup cakes to link to—both were surprisingly non-terrible!)
Addendum
I think I stopped writing this one since I started questioning whether prototype theory was even the right model for resolving "Is a tomato a fruit?" I fell down a Wikipedia rabbit hole about different linguistic theories of definition, and then I was done for.
What I definitely stand by, though, is that it's not very productive to argue about whether something is or isn't "really" a fruit! "Fruit" is a cluster in thing-space. The apple is very fruit, the tomato is somewhat fruit, and the Impossible Burger (which I waxed lyrical about in 2019) is not fruit. It's not enough to ask "Is it fruit?" You must first ask "Why do we want to know whether it's a fruit?" And then we can discuss the underlying question that we actually care about instead of semantics. (This idea applies to a lot of heated culture-war discussion topics too.)
Unless we're just here to have fun, that is. In that case, my strong and unwavering opinion is that pineapple is a vegetable. It's better in savory dishes (like pizza and stir-fries) than sweet dishes, so it aligns more with the "vegetable" cluster than the "fruit" one.
Teaser for Tomorrow
That wasn't very much linguistics. Well, if you wanted more, you'll be in luck! Tomorrow, I cover a constructed language of my own design: "Ravniconlang: The Language of Guilds"!
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