Comments on “Are eggplants fruits?”

There’s a double “of” on footnote 6 ;)

“Pretty much the only available examples of natural kinds of of eggplant-sized objects were biological species.”

I distinctly remember my own eggplant-like a-ha moment. At the peak of animalistic magical thinking in my childhood I pretended that all objects have souls. That worked pretty well until one day I was eating a watermelon and I got stuck thinking whether cut up parts of the watermelon were some new objects or the same one, and what about the seeds that were left after the flesh was eaten?

Whenever I came across Plato’s world of ideal forms afterwards, I thought about that watermelon and considered his theory as a failed idealistic attempt at defining separate objects.

That makes me wonder about the relationship between the explicit usage of metarational thinking (considered to be more characteristic for 30+, phd folks) and the intuitive usage that is always there in practical life but not exposed. Stages of development suggest that first a person should learn systems and then understand their limitations. It would be interesting to know whether early exposure to the concept of nebulosity would help progress to metarational thinking more easily or hinder the mastery of rational systems.