May 11, 2025
I read a post on LinkedIn that said something like “knowledge is knowing that tomato is a fruit and wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad”. Which is mostly remarkable as an expression of what counts as a bon mot over at LinkedIn, but since I’ve often used the tomato as an example in my talk about categorization, I paid a little more attention than I otherwise would.
I noticed that some commenters remarked that what’s missing is context. That is, in the botanic context, a tomato is considered to be a fruit, whereas in the culinary context, the tomato is more like a vegetable. This is roughly the same point that I have been making in my talk. It is perhaps best expressed by my friend Romeu, who did one better to include the third context of theatre.
In the culinary bounded context: 🍅 is a vegetable.
In the botanic bounded context: 🍅 is a fruit.
In 🎭 bounded context: 🍅 is feedback.– Romeu Moura (@malk-zameth.bsky.social) October 23, 2023
I am sympathetic to this way of thinking, even though we should be aware that when we introducing contexts like this, we are inventing more abstractions, more categories, each perhaps equally problematic as categories like fruit and vegetable, conjuring them into being and imposing them on reality for our own purposes. We are effectively saying that we can classify real-life situations into these contexts, and this will help resolve our apparent confusion and ambiguity. Maybe so, but we are applying epicycles. We are using categorization to alleviate the problems inherent in categorization. We hope we can address the shortcomings of categories with more categories.
I am tempted to try to go the other way. I wonder if we could do better with much fewer categories in this situation. In fact, what would happen if we were to drop all categories except the tomato itself? This is pretty much as concrete as we can hope to get without abandoning categories altogether and speak only of individual objects.
In my talk, I argue that a tomato by itself, without a concrete context in which we can interpret the tomato and how it relates to its environment, is really Schrödinger’s tomato. That is, we can’t say what the tomato is, because we don’t know if we are in the botanic context or the culinary context or the theatre context or perhaps some ingenious context no-one has thought about yet when discussing these matters! We can’t tell unless we examine the context. But this is only half true. We do know one thing, which is the most essential thing: the tomato is a tomato.
To avoid falling into my own trap, let me qualify that a bit. Of course, tomato is a fuzzy category in its own right, with specimens ranging from prototypical tomatoes to edge cases to non-tomatoes. But in order to make any point at all, let’s assume we have in our hand a prototypical tomato, the familiar red, round, edible, squishy thing that finds good usage when you are making pizza sauce, the kind which pretty much everyone you ask would agree is a typical tomato. We are not questioning its membership in the tomato category.
What is it? What is this thing that we have in our hand? Is it a fruit? Is it a vegetable? Is it feedback? Something else? It seems to me that we are running a fool’s errand, getting caught in the web we have spun from our thoughts. In all contexts, it is first and foremost a tomato. Everything else is either irrelevant or secondary. We are interested in tomatoes as tomatoes.
In the culinary context, this is obvious. No chef treats the tomato the way they do because they consider it to be a vegetable. They do it because they consider it to be a tomato! The only thing the chef will worry about is whether or not it is a high quality tomato, if it has seen plenty of sun and is full of flavor. The story ends there. Talking about higher levels of categorization is quite ridiculous and of little relevance to the chef.
In the botanic context, the situation may at first glance seem to be reversed, at least for us non-botanists. I feel less certain about the relative priorities of a botanist than I do about those of a chef. Presumably the taxonomy of edible plants is of more importance to a botanist than anyone else. But at the same time, the botanist is better equipped than anyone else to realize the artificial nature of all such categorizations. A botanist may note that the tomato fits the technical definition of a berry (a fleshy fruit without pits that develop from a single flower), but they will also know that this definition is in a sense arbitrary. A botanist made it up! What remains non-arbitrary is the tomato itself, which is the real object of study.
In the theatre context, too, a tomato is just a tomato. It is through its properties as a tomato (ideally an over-ripe one) that it gets is potential to be used as feedback. When we say that the tomato is feedback, we exploit the flexibility of the verb “to be”, which ranges from signifying identity to (more or less prototypical) category membership to metaphor to role and function. It is more precise to say that the tomato acts as feedback, represents feedback or conveys feedback. We are using the tomato for a particular purpose. But it remains a tomato throughout! It loses nothing of its tomato nature. As such it is not abstracted. There is no transformation of ontological status from the concrete into the abstract: if there was, the tomato would have to relinquish its physical characteristics and hence cease to be effective as feedback!
Hence my own take on Romeu’s quote is simply that
In the culinary bounded context: 🍅 is a 🍅.
In the botanic bounded context: 🍅 is a 🍅.
In 🎭 bounded context: 🍅 is a 🍅.– Einar W. Høst (@einarwh.bsky.social) May 11, 2025