Keith Douglas
Last time I asked for some indulgence from the editor and from the readers to engage in a little eulogizing. I trust they were indeed “good words,” or something like that. Alex seems to have thought so. Thank you! I will not engage in the vexed problem of the translation of “logos” here, but this is amazingly the first time I have thought about the etymology of “euology.”
This month we return to metaphysics, and maybe some physical chemistry.
The Metaphysics of Peanut Butter
I recently bought a jar of peanut butter. Nothing special or out of the ordinary. I have been eating this staple food for longer than I can remember. One of my funniest early memories is being obsessed on a plane trip to Calgary to have a peanut butter and pickle sandwich once we arrived at the home of the relative we were visiting. I remember being indulged! What is it about these items that made me a) want them and b) predict that the relative of ours would have them on hand? Those questions are more for the epistemology and psychology of peanut butter. By contrast, here I would like to reflect on the warning label (if that is what it is) on the jar.
“Oil separation naturally occurs with this product. Stir fully before use. Refrigerate after opening.”
The French text of the label at a glance seems to be equivalent and I will ignore again the vagaries of translation. Let’s take this one word at a time and see what it is saying by, as we with humanities backgrounds say, close reading it. I will be very cagey as to what knowledge to invoke in understanding here. Please bear with me and any seeming inconsistencies that result.
“Oil.” We know from chemistry and even from cooking that there are many kinds of oil. This is not the oil associated with petroleum. We know that’s poisonous. Oftentimes a distinction is made between plant oils — which I assume this is — and mineral oils, like petroleum. But is that the only distinction? What makes them “the same,” if anything. Is the oil part of the peanut butter? Or is it something that is just there … or? (Readers who may remember my Skepticamp presentation on actions from years ago may hear an echo. This is deliberate. See if you can remember who I referenced in that context.)
“Separation.” Does this mean all of the oil will be in a different place from whatever else is in there? Why does this happen? This sort of result should be very puzzling to someone who thinks all motion is impressed (or otherwise due to a “force”) and not inertial or intrinsic.
“Naturally.” As opposed to what? Not “supernaturally,” presumably. Would you buy a jar of almond butter that said its oil separated supernaturally? It also does not seem to mean as opposed to “socially” or “conventionally” or similar ancient oppositions. It seems to mean “spontaneously,” as we just alluded to. But why bring this up? The intention seems to be to reassure people that it is an expected thing, and not to worry. But why should spontaneity be a good thing? After all, if I buy bread to eat with the peanut butter, it could say: “Will naturally sprout mold” on it, but most of those we won’t want to eat.
“Occurs.” Doesn’t say when or the like, just that it will happen. Some linguistic analysis would suggest that this is an event, rather than a process, by appealing to the grammatical categories here. 23 years ago I wrote a thesis which amongst other things defends the idea that this grammatical distinction (between events and processes) is not very useful, and leave it to the interested reader to find it.
“With.” I don’t think there is much to say about this word.
“This product.” I am going to take these together, for reasons which I trust will be more apparent shortly. An interesting part here is that the wording suggests that it is in some sense one entity. Is this a unity in some “deeper” sense, and if so, in virtue of what? Contrarially, if purely commercial, why is it sold together? I think there is at least a case to be made that it is one entity. For example, when you buy the jar, the contents at least are relatively homogeneous to at least the naked eye (constant brown colour, more or less but not complete uniform texture) and it has a very short ingredients list. “100% dry roasted peanuts. May contain tree nuts.”
Yet, why is “peanut” selected as an ingredient? Even Aristotle would know that a peanut in some sense has a different composition than an olive or a piece of cheese. Note, however, I moved from “ingredient” to “composition.” Is there a difference? Perhaps. Take the oil we discussed earlier. The oil seems to be different from the peanut butter: One can reproduce the latter, it seems, by handling the oil. Yet it becomes indistinguishable from it when you mix them. Is this a purely perceptual change or has something else gone on?
“Stir.” A word we learn in the nursery, for sure, but can you explain it? It appears to do something with what we stir: When we stir two things together, we seem to sometimes, but not always, create a third. Here chemists will distinguish between solutions, colloids, emulsions, and much else. But why? In antiquity there was actually a debate between several schools of thought on a related question. Take a drop of wine and put it into the sea. What happens to it? Does it destroy the wine because you can’t see it anymore, or is there good reason to suppose that it is somehow still there. And if it is, is it everywhere in the sea or a little bit here, a little bit there.
We have come to another area where the debate over atomism applies. Here’s why some people did not find atomism plausible here: If there is a little bit of oil and a little bit of whatever you call the rest of the peanut butter interspersed, then it seems there is no peanut butter just a bit of oil, etc. It would be like taking rice and beans and simply stirring them together for bean salad or something, mere “juxtaposition,” as it was stated.
“Fully.” This reminds me of the joke about how the instructions to some shampoos are endless. “Lather. Rinse. Repeat.” In the case of the peanut butter, how does one know when to stop? We do it perceptually, it seems to me. Pragmatically that is perhaps enough. We can even taste and react to the purer oil with disgust or just with annoyance. But again, explain this to your inquisitive five-year-old, or to an extraterrestrial. I suspect, however, you will find that most adult humans will understand what to do after some exploration. Why is that? One of my undergraduate courses discussed the question of innate ideas under the auspices I labeled today’s discussion under: metaphysics. I bring this up because one way to get yourself puzzled is to compare how easy some of this is to most children versus how perplexing it would be to design an artifact to do the same thing.
“Before.” Grammatical tense of some kind or other appears to be a linguistic universal. But what is the reference of this part of the passage? A naive formalization would suggest that there are two times, t and t’ and t < t’, etc. I will leave more of the timey wimey stuff for later.
“Use.” It is not surprising that a practical word eventually comes up. Think how you learn to use foods; again from the crib and nursery on. It becomes so second nature to us that unfamiliar foods can be very perplexing. My father told the story of a colleague of his. The colleague was a Japanese-Canadian, one who had come to Canada for graduate studies and stayed, marrying a French-Canadian along the way. Yet years into all of that, he asked my father, “What do you do with cheese?” Lesson: Philosophical anthropology I dare say must include something about food.
Those of you who know the saying “You are what you eat” might find it amusing to consider that the original line in German is a pun that does not translate. Yet, humour aside, there is an important further matter to reflect on: When we eat the peanut butter, we gain flesh and so on. How does that work? This again sounds trivial, but: Do we turn the peanut butter into something? Do we extract something and add the same stuff to what is already there? There are various conceivable ways this could turn out. I dare say both are true. I leave this to the reader to puzzle through why I would make that claim.
“Refrigerate.” I suspect readers of this column will understand this, at least practically. But to reduce in temperature (or keep it low) is an interesting idea. Temperature is easiest to understand, at least to me, when it applies to a gas. It can be seen to mean kinetic energy of entities at a small scale. This raises questions about idealizations, which I have dealt with in other columns. It also raises questions about small and large, and debates over “reductionism.” Some philosophers regard temperature as “reduced” to mean kinetic energy because of the derivations I have alluded to. Yet we encounter temperatures of liquids and solids, not just gases, and there the situation is more complicated.
Incidentally, is peanut butter a solid or a liquid? Under what conditions? Does the fact that it separates make a difference here?
“After.” I have dealt with time earlier and will ignore this beyond the psychological remark: Why do we not worry if someone were to refrigerate the peanut butter during use? This sounds like something Wittgenstein might have remarked.
“Opening.” I have spent most of my column talking about the peanut butter proper. This word is about the jar, and raises questions about inside vs. outside and hence more generally about boundaries. Mathematicians love this area so much that it forms, in massive generalization, some parts of topology. However, one does not need these ideas to at least puzzle about what happens when we open the jar. If we turn the lid just a little, nothing much seems to happen. Eventually, the lid is far enough away from the rest of the jar that we can see them as two items. Were they two to begin with? Or did I make two?
The topological questions get enriched by mereological ones. Mereology is one name of the theory of part-whole relations. These areas are amongst the most prolifically studied by some rare creatures indeed: metaphysicians. The famous “Lvov-Warsaw school” of Polish philosophical logicians from the time between the world wars did pioneering work in this area, and influenced some of my teachers. I dare say that building a robot will force one to consider this ancient question of “the one and the many.” Or, as I alluded to earlier, “the same and not the same.” Will the robot also be able to learn boundaries and understand betweenness? If it is to help us open a sticky jar of peanut butter, I dare say it must. And that is, at least for me, one of the reasons to take metaphysics seriously, in addition to it being fun!
Interesting read. Thanks a lot.
The word “With”: is that the best preposition to use? How about “in”?: “Oil separation naturally occurs in this product.” I have a feeling the company would frown on this phasing, but for the sake of logic, would “in” perhaps be better? Or some other word? …
Anyway, thanks again.
My jar of peanut butter came with the instruction, “Twist to open”. By “twist”, did they mean to distort the truth? If so, that would be the easy part for me, growing up in a dysfunctional family. Otherwise, twisting open a jar of peanut butter takes far more torque than my arthritic fingers can summon up. Who knew that Mr. Kraft was such a metaphysicist?