Thank you, Luke Rutherford, for a question that no doubt keeps us all up at night!
I see you have cleverly dictated the terms of the debate within your question. Only two options seem open to me: either cereal is a soup or cereal is a salad. Either way I risk making myself out to be a fool: you would have me claim that cereal is a soup or that it is a salad! Preposterous. I could of course be facetious and respond that no, cereal is not a soup or a salad; it is cereal. This wouldn’t do at all and would belittle the serious topic we find ourselves grappling with. So how can I worm my way out of this one while preserving the dignity both of philosophy and of myself?
I could bite the bullet and approach the topic head on. This would involve me spelling out the criteria we ordinarily associate with soup, then with salad, then observing similarities and differences between these two categories and the category of cereal before concluding that I really don’t know after all. Or perhaps I could insist on one or the other, given what I take to be an undesirable implication of one position. Cereal is only a salad if you’re prepared to put vinegar and oil on your cornflakes!
I would rather take a step back and make a few observations about this variety of question. If you have not already, I recommend reading Carl Messenger’s wonderful response to a similar question asked on this page: Is a hot dog a sandwich? Carl admirably takes up the baton and answers this question head on (although the stakes are considerably lower; he is not forced to answer whether a hot dog is a sandwich or a casserole). What was the result of Carl’s endeavour? In short, the question sparked a lively discussion in the comments in which one commentator simply asserted that a hot dog was after all a sandwich, despite the careful reasoning laid out by Carl in his response. We can learn a lot from this exchange.
Primarily, no matter what arguments we might put forward in response to one of these questions, the matter will never be satisfactorily settled. We may not have explicit reasons to consider a hot dog a sandwich, or cereal a soup, but by god some of us certainly strongly feel that way! Say what you like, I will be deep in the cold, cold ground before I accept that cereal is a salad. This is due to the nature of concepts. Concepts are malleable. They change within an individual over time, and different people have different concepts even when they use the same words. Further, concepts are not made up of rules which specify how they are to be applied. They are rich, involving emotional and sensory content. It is folly to attempt to lay bare the full gamut of information contained in an ordinary concept like cereal and attempt to extract a categorical answer to your question. Crucially, this means I can avoid asserting that cereal is a soup or a salad. Nice try.
What do you think? Cereal – soup or salad? Let us know in the comments.
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I did a BA in Philosophy and Literature at the University of Warwick, an MPhil in Philosophy at Warwick and am about to start a PhD in Philosophy at… Warwick. My primary research interests are the philosophy of cognitive science, philosophy of mind and the ontology of concepts (basically I want to know what concepts are). Immanuel Kant is the source of much inspiration for me. My views on cognition are overtly Kantian and I’m pretty sure he solved the whole idealism thing with transcendental idealism, the only sensible position one can take.