this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2025
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To me arguing over which fruit belongs in which category is a prime example of people arguing over shadows in Plato's cave. Not that it's a waste of time or anything but sometimes people act like tomatoes won't grow if you call them vegetables. Like at the end of the day it's just humans developing a system to make sense of nature rather than discovering an inherent, pre-existing system.
The core of the matter is that we have multiple, mutually incompatible schemes sharing in part the same terminology. Biology is not cooking, both fields care about vastly different things thus the categorisation scheme is different, that's the end of it. Culinarily, tomatoes have too much umami to be fruit. Botanically peppermint is an aromatic, I recommend you not put any into your soffritto.
EDIT:
Tomato is also dominated by oxalic acid, not malic, citric, (typical fruit acids) or acetic (fermented/overripe). Oxalic acid is in parsley, chives, spinach, beans, lettuce, that kind of stuff. "It's sour" isn't sufficient to describe a taste profile, our tongues may not tell them apart but our noses definitely do.
I think it should be possible to break the culinary categorisation down to chemistry. That doesn't tell you anything about the "why" but it's definitely not random and definitely not all in our heads.
Oh, this is actually a perfect example of the arbitreity of mapping systems!
A looong time ago on reddit, I got into an argument with someone who was doing that thing where you confuse the map for the object itself. We were mostly talking about the chemistry table. But anyway, he just could not see how a change in motivation, that is what the map designer finds useful, could change how the map is arranged.
I mean, I don't think this would convince him: he would just say the culinary version isn't real. But still, I really like it.
I mean that's a pretty big difference right?
Like, the periodic tables mapping isn't arbitrary or alternate.
Like you can't actually map the periodic a different way and it's in a sense "self evident" in a way arbitrary mappings aren't.
The periodic table itself is a kind of proof of quantum theory, or at least, strong supporting evidence. While it can be displayed differently, actually couldn't be arranged differently and the things we know about physics hold true.
Neither the biology nor culinary mappings are arbitrary, they have their rhyme and reason. Also biology would be the alternate one? Because the culinary definitions were definitely first.
Did you know that there's quite extreme disagreements on what metals are? Chemists will tell you one thing and not be particularly unified in their response around the topic of semimetals, while astrophysicists have a very simple definition of metals: Anything that has more protons than helium.
Who is right? This has nothing to do with metaphysics (I've read a bit down the thread) as in "what is beyond physics, god, and stuff", but how we interpret our (scientific) observations. Neither definition of metals is more correct than the other, they're both maps drawn by scientists caring about vastly different things. Neither side says that the other is wrong -- they just don't care for it.
Back to the periodic table itself: Defining elements by protons has quite some predictive power but at the same time it's a vast oversimplification of what actually goes on, ask any quantum chemist. It is rooted in quite hard science, but that doesn't make it ground reality. Actual reality is something we can't observe because to observe anything we first have to project it into our minds. All perception is modelling: Ask any neuroscientist. Or, for that matter, Plato.
Ah, there he is!
Just kidding.
The extreme usefulness of the one periodic table as we know it is why this is so hard to talk about. Philosophically, it isn't any different: it is arranged by human values for human consumption. I think there is likely a strong reason that alien values would converge here, but that doesn't really affect its arbitreity. The elements don't have value unto themselves, they just are.
And there are plenty of different ways to arrange it. For one, if all you care about are the metals for some reason, you can arrange the nonmetals out of it completely. You could keep a linear, alphabetical list because whatever work you're doing is derived from chemistry but does not actually care about atomic values.
Hey, that guy is a troll and a pretty good one. Block and move on, you're worth it
yeah. you don't understand the periodic table. this is the same cliff that both post-modernists and fascists have pushed themselves off of.
You are mistaking relativity for subjectivity and the two things are not equal. Human experience is not the arbiter of truth, and you couldn't have picked a possibly worse example than the periodic table. To put a finer point on it: No. There aren't other ways to construct the periodic table. Its construction has nothing to do with human perception.
You should've spend the time to go read about it before you use it as an example.
Wow, there he is. Like, for real.
It's okay, man. You majored in some science field, you don't care much for philosophy; we don't have to be at each other's throats here. I'm not questioning the validity of the periodic table, it's simply a way of thinking about it.
Dude I understand what you think you are saying and you are quite simply wrong. You don't understand what the periodic table is if you think it could be constructed in some other way or that it's organization is arbitrary or subjective.
You are also wrong in the basic philosophy of it.
No wonder you got the piss taken out of your in that other place.
It can be constructed in other ways. I gave you two of them. Those other presentations are not "less correct," they're just less useful. It just so happens that the most useful, scientific depiction of the table to us is also the one that contains the most facts.
Keep in mind, this argument I had was several proxy-arguments downstream of whether or not transwomen are women. So, be aware of what waters you're treading into.
Isn't the rejection of post-modernism like a very Jordan-Peterson–like thing to do? I'm pretty sure I heard him whining about it when he was also whining about ~~jews~~ cultural marxists.
Peterson is kinda the embodiment of post-modernism, that is, he does all his ideology building by questioning everything else into oblivion.
Of course, not knowing what he's talking about is also something very Jordan-Peterson-like so that all tracks.
Neither of the two constructions you listed would result in a periodic table. You don't know this because you don't actually know what a periodic table is. Try again.
To help you along, please explain to me: why the elements in the periodic table are ordered as they are? Or more readily, what determines the ordering of the periodic table? I'll give you two huge hints, and a name to help you. Search the name Mendeleev, and orbital and proton.
So your telling me that I need to be cautious of you derailing the conversation away from it's original premise?
And there we are.
No it's a very Noam Chomskey thing to do. Jordon Peterson, like most fascists, draws largely on the principles of post-modernists. For all intents and purposes, he is one, in that he relies on the idea that truth and reality are relative to justify his arguments. I agree with Chomskey in his critiques of both post modernism and fascism, especially in their arbitrary use of language and sophistry to disguise the hollowness of their arguments.
That being said, i'll be keeping you to the premise and the periodic table for this discussion. It need not go further.
If the ordering of the periodic table were arbitrary, it couldn't be a periodic table. It is only a periodic table by this very reason. When ordering by orbital and atomic weight, Mendeleev not only came up with a diagram that effectively predicted all of the observable properties of the elements, but also predicted elements which were not yet known to human kind.
And therein lay the difference.
Imagine a person is coming up with a dictionary for English. And in a dream they came up with some alternative ordering. And in that alternative ordering, suddenly, they not only had a dictionary for English, but also Farsi, and Cantonese. Every language became interpretable through this reordering. In fact, the ordering even predicted languages that were not yet known to the person who developed the order. But the order stated that they should be there, or at least be possible. And when looked for in those places the languages were found. The ordering even gives the recipe for languages that don't exist.
This is the difference.
I... didn't say that they would? If you change the map, it's obviously a different map. You'd call it "Metallica's table of metals," or something.
No... I just don't think you realize how anti-intellectual you're being.
Okay, dad. But, you were the one who brought up fascists.
Very rude, by the way.
Uh, to anyone reading, I guess: Look up Jordan Peterson's wikipedia. He is not a fan of whatever his meat-addled brain thinks Post Modernism is.
It is arbitrarily a periodic table because the periodic table has utility. That utility is why we don't arrange them a different way. This isn't complicated.
If you want an example of different motivations: Do these periods tell you how beautiful each element is? Does beauty rise in each column and row? You might need a different map for that.
That would be very insightful. I would say we should arbitrarily prefer that ordering because of how useful it would be to us.
Or we could arbitrarily choose not to because just the one language is good enough, innit?
Im not being anti intellectual. I simply have no patience for frauds masquerading their metaphysics as philosophy.
In the end you can't argue the point on its merits and are just engaging in sophistry. So we'll come back to the first: you don't actually know what the periodic table of the elements is. You should stop pretending you have a point if you can't make make it.
If you don't understand the difference between metaphysics and philosophy, its probably best you did neither.
Aw, don't be a sore loser.
I can't engage with your point on its merits because it's not relevant to the argument that I'm making—it's a complete non-sequitur.
You want me to prove that the periodic table doesn't predict undiscovered elements? What does that have to do with where people direct their effort and attention?
This is why the tomato fruit/vegetable example is so useful: it's about what facts are useful to whom. It actually has nothing to do with the periodic table at all, that just happens to be a particularly prickly thorn for stem majors.
You are delusional if you think you "won" anything.
The only thing you did was demonstrate that you are a vapid waste of time. You being in a self sucking circle jerk with yourself isn't philosophy.
You don't know what you are talking about when it comes to philosophy of science and are a waste of everyone's time, including your own.
Christ, my man, do you need a time out? Are you late for a nap or something?
I promise you there's nothing at stake here; I'm not "dismantling" chemistry. I agree it's useful, it's good stuff. Mendeleev did a good job.
you havent 'done' anything here other than jerk yourself off.
I agree with what you mean in kind of a broad-strokes way, but as individuals our subjective experiences of flavors can vary pretty wildly. There's genetics, neurology, age, and habit/experience that influence our taste in terms of actually sensing the chemicals. Then there's what we see, taste, and smell just prior or during tasting that severely impact our interpretation of that chemical sense.
You never had tomato pie? It would likely change your idea of what too much savoriness is.
I haven't but that sounds like a pie not a cake. A meal, not a dessert.
Well, not all pies are desserts for sure, but a tomato pie is, unless you deviate from the usual recipes.
Besides, you didn't say that a dessert has to be a cake.
There's also tomato jams, compote, and you can do a tomato cake mind you, a tomato cake is really more like banana bread, where it's a flavoring more than the star of the show.
Point is that tomatoes can definitely serve in the same role as "fruit", just like some things that are sweeter can be used in savory dishes.
It's about the preparation, not the ingredient. I mean, look at bacon jam. Not a dessert, but it's a savory and sweet spread that's used in the same was as fruit based jams. Onion jam is in the same range (and, as a side note, there's also onion and tomato pie which is more of a savory dish than a dessert, despite being fairly sweet anyway).
From a culinary standpoint, there are few ingredients that are fully excluded from dessert territory by virtue of having strong savory taste. There's also not many excluded from entrees purely because they're sweet. It's all a wonderful spectrum of sweet and savory
I want my bananas to be the star of the bread show.
But to be fair, I am a horny slut for bananas.
I should look up some tomato stuff; I've never even heard of these things.
Banana bread may be the best baked good in human history.
"Botanically" "culinary" "terminology" "biology" and then you say umami seriously. Which is entirely made up.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33580387/
I totally agree. It is completely nonsense to say. In other languages it is different. I just know some Spanish, but they don't have a word for berries or nuts, it is all just fruit. (Forrest fruit for berries or dried fruit for nuts) but they don't call potatoes vegetables, but "tuberculo". Interesting difference, which i guess is because they have another climate and other plants.
We do just call it a vegetable in my language.
Bayas y nueces... Tubérculo is closer to the botanical definition because it is a tuber (storage organ) and not a fruit (like most vegetables). And I would think that tubérculo could be any tuber vegetable, not just papas/patatas. Things like ñame or otoe are called tubérculo también.
Thanks for the clarification. I was under the impression that nuez would only refer to walnut. And that an almond would not be a nuez.
Is it a country specific thing because I usually see frutos del bosque in Spain?
I guess things can have multiple names, too. In German you would also say WaldfrĂĽchte (forest fruits) to mixed berries, but they are still Beeren (berries) as well. If you search for "postre de bayas" or "pastel de bayas" many recipes pop up. And sure, Spanish is obviously a diverse language with the divide between Spanish from Spain and from Latin America.
Disclaimer: I'm part of the scientific bubble so that's why I may here more terms that are botanical in Spanish ;)
What about nuez?
Yeah, seems like you're right about kurz. It's mostly just walnuts although you can find recipes where they say nueces and use pecans. Almendras seem to be classified as a separate thing from nuts, interesting. Wasn't aware of that before! I'd just use the term "nuez" like I would in German maybe that's why I never noticed :D
Technically, the pre-existing system could be evolutionary biology. I'm just saying that in some cases, a little bit of pedantry is enjoyable. It's an acquired taste, maybe