blog.qnt.moe

Tomato is a vegetable and Oxygen is a metal

I have a problem with a specific class of pop facts that get thrown around. It goes like this: someone says, for example, "I love tomatoes, it's a juicy vegetable", only to be responded with something like "well, you know, it's technically a fruit".

I think there's a greater issue to resolve before we assign truth values to things stated by both of these people, and I think the underlying lesson is much more valuable than having a clean resolution on what category tomato belongs to.

Domain specific terminology

It's incorrect to assume terminology from one domain can't mean something very different in another domain.

It's instantly obvious when you look at an example:

Bug (n.)

(entomology) An insect of the order Hemiptera (the “true bugs”).

(informal, proscribed) Any motile small terrestrial invertebrate, especially one that is seen as a pest.

In computing, the same word is used for something completely unreleated:

(computing, engineering jargon) A problem that needs fixing.

However, things can get much dirtier. Sometimes the terminologies overalap (there is not a rule that says they can't). And such terms can lead to confusion.

Metal (n.)

Any of a number of chemical elements in the periodic table that form a metallic bond with other metal atoms; generally shiny, somewhat malleable and hard, often a conductor of heat and electricity.

but:

(astronomy) An element which was not directly created after the Big Bang but instead formed through nuclear reactions; any element other than hydrogen and helium.

(I wasn't aware of this unusual usage of the term metal until I looked for good examples for this article. Thanks to my friend Pranav Mahapatra from evincism.com for validating the term is actually in common use in this sense.)

The meaning of a word lies in its use [0]

Words don't exist in isolation, context around them can change what they mean.

I would go as far as saying that different people may use and understand a word slightly differently in the same discussion. A lot of times, this results in disagreements: Is hijra a gender? Yes and no:

Gender (n.)

[..]

  1. Sex (a category, either male or female)

  2. Identification as a man, a woman, or something else, and association with a (social) role or set of behavioral and cultural traits, clothing, etc; a category to which a person belongs on this basis.

Neither of the answer is incorrect, they are simply using the word "gender" differently. And neither of these usages of the term is incorrect either. You cannot deny that for most of the history gender simply meant sex and continues to do so. You also cannot refuse, at the same time, that people (and acadamia) don't use it in the second sense.

When having discourse, I think it's imporant that you clarify in what sense your opponents are using a word. This video comes to mind: Jordan Peterson: "What do you mean by believe". He was memed, a lot, by atheists, because he asked "What do you mean by believe"--I think he was doing something, however much I disagree with his definition of what it means to "believe", it's how he chooses to use the word. It's an important clarification however, becuase now the discussion can proceed with his understanding of what it means to believe in mind.

I think we should do this more often.

Mutual exclusion

Two categories may not necessarily be mutually exclusive, that is, a thing can belong to two different categories, A and B, unless their definitions necessarily require them to be disjoint.

This seems obvious, but we do think of some categories as mutually exclusive when they are not. Consider: water, it's both natual (as in naturally occuring) and a chemical substance. A lot of people seem to use the term chemical to mean synthesised, harmful substances, which is of course in mutual exclusion with natuarally occuring.

Chemical (n.)

  1. (chemistry, sciences) Any specific chemical element or chemical compound or alloy.

  2. (colloquial) An artificial chemical compound. "I color my hair with henna, not chemicals."

  3. (slang) An addictive drug.

Again, I am not arguing against such usage, but academia uses it in a way that is not mutually exclusive with natural, therefore, as far as chemists are concerned, water is both natural and a chemical.

Imagine having a conversation where one states "water is a chemical" and the other person states, with an intention to refute, that water is natural. They would be right, but it's not the argument the other person think they are making. Being a natural substance does not imply that water is not chemical. Of course, their statement is true, but it's not in conflict with the initial statement the other person made.

Tomato

I started with tomatoes, but I sidelined them for the rest of the article.

The pop fact that "tomato is a fruit" has it's origins in the botanical definition of a fruit:

fruit (n.)

  1. (botany) A product of fertilization in a plant, specifically:

    • The seed-bearing part of a plant; often edible, colourful, fragrant, and sweet or sour; produced from a floral ovary after fertilization.

    • The spores of cryptogams and their accessory organs.

Tomatoes fit.

However, the same pop fact has now taken the shape of "tomato is a fruit, not vegetable".

This stems from the fact that in culinary, fruits and vegetables are disjoint categories.

You can't eat your cake and have it too..

Botanical concept of a "fruit" is about classifying parts a plant. The parts of plants that are not fruit are: stem, leaf, root.

The category of vegetable is simply not something botany concerns itself with. Why should it? Whether something is vegetable is of little importance to a botanist.

To me, saying "tomato is a fruit, not a vegetable" is an idiotic statement to make. Not because it is false (which it actually is [1]), but because it misses the point of both, botany and culinary classification of fruits and vegtables.

It reads like the person making the claim does not actually know what a botanical fruit is--one would never contrast that with a vegetable otherwise.

This "pop fact" is "pop" becuase it spread by people stating it to others verbatim without actually getting into the nature of those words in botanical and culinary disciplines, and providing no argument for why something that's a fruit can't be a vegetable (spoiler: it can).

Furthermore, the culinary classification is culture based and there is no clear line between fruits and vegetables.

Quoting Wiktionary:

  1. (culinary) Any sweet or sour, edible part of a plant that resembles seed-bearing fruit (see former sense) even if it does not develop from a floral ovary.

    • A sweet or sweetish vegetable, such as the petioles of rhubarb, that resembles a true fruit or is used in cookery as if it was a fruit.

But the way I personally see people use the term as:

A part of the plant, shaped like true-fruit, which is eaten without cooking.

By this definition, something can be a (culinary) fruit or vegetable depending on where you live and the culinary norms.

In parts of India, jackfruit is cooked while in others it's eaten raw. That makes jackfruit a:

Even at an individual level, for a person who eats tomatos raw (yes I do), it is a (culinary) fruit.

See it

Below is an interactive diagram that shows relationship between each of these terms. Intersections are clickable.

Botanic fruits Vegetables Culinaryfruits Click a circle, then keep clicking inside the selection to narrow it

Fin

Do you know more such terms that have caused similar class of confusion? My e-mail inbox is open.

Also: how do you define a vegetable?

  1. Philosophische Untersuchungen

  2. When you talk about fruits and vegetables in the same sentence, I am automatically going to assume you mean "culinary fruit" since the entire category of a "botanical vegetable" simply does not exist.