Plato and Pinot

S

Saina Nieminen

Saina Nieminen
Shelter Winery (Hans-Bert Espe und Silke Wolf) Blanc de Noir 2008 - Baden; 12% abv; 10g/l RS; 8,8g/l acidity; bottle #274 of 2698; 20

The great evolutionary biologist and philosopher of biology, Ernst Mayr, felt that the natural sciences for much of history have been plagued by Platonic essentialism. It is the idea, further developed by Aristotle, that all things had two properties, the accidental and the essential. The accidental properties can vary within its kind, but essential properties define what the kind is. So the essence is unchanging, immortal and not seen in the world - it exists in the realm of ideas.

Though a very influential idea (pun unintended), it is completely at odds with biology and linguistics. In the real world, we shouldn't be seeking the essence of a dog or the essence of the French language. They are ever-changing; there is nothing immutable about them.

IIRC it was another anti-essentialist philosopher with a strong background in biology, Daniel Dennett, who argued that people have evolved to become essentialists (it is a useful trait in every-day life: it's how we recognize a person as that person even when she has different expressions on her face or has a different hair-do...) even though, as with evolution and linguistics, it just doesn't make sense. I have tried to wean myself from this problematic philosophy and, indeed as some past threads have shown, at least in linguistics I have managed.

With wines, however, I find myself over and over again thinking in such Platonic terms. And it is hard not to, especially when such a wine as this still, white Pinot Noir comes my way and it turns out to have such aromatics as I hope to see in red Pinot Noir.

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It is light as water, crisp and citrussy with a red, slightly spicy tone to the fruit - it has to me an obvious kinship with unspoofulated red Burgundy. It is crisp and has such high acidity that I don't sense the 10g/l RS: dry, mineral, refreshing and extremely moreish. So am I now sinning and essentializing? Is essentialism a vinous evil, too?
 
Wow, interesting. Will keep a look out.

Don't slip too far away from essentialism. We can still know something as a "dog" and distinguish it from a "cat." You can still have kinds while recognizing variation as part of any wild population.

Or so I am free to think with fb not reading the board much.

Now in bacteria, it gets awfully tricky. Miscegenating genome-swappers, they are.
 
Essentialism is bad metaphysics but not bad as a rule of thumb. All species are fungible over long enough periods of time, but SF Joe is right that for walking through the world, dogs are recognizable.

Aristotle by the way did not believe that ideal forms were real. His distinction between accidents and essences works very well for directions on how to define things.

Likewise, spoofulation won't work as a metaphysical concept. There isn't a good enough dividing line between the natural and interventions. But numbers of us know it when we see or taste it.
 
originally posted by SFJoe:
Don't slip too far away from essentialism. We can still know something as a "dog" and distinguish it from a "cat."
Click to expand...

But how we know that is the interesting part. I guess Dennett's idea of being evolved to see essences where there are none is part. And I guess that is what Jonathan is saying, too?
 
originally posted by Otto Nieminen:
originally posted by SFJoe:
Don't slip too far away from essentialism. We can still know something as a "dog" and distinguish it from a "cat."
Click to expand...

But how we know that is the interesting part. I guess Dennett's idea of being evolved to see essences where there are none is part. And I guess that is what Jonathan is saying, too?
Click to expand...

Oh, well, I hate to divert from deep epistemology and our evolution to consider crude questions like, "Which of these beings can interbreed?" and sorting them out that way.

I even know some people who are doing those experiments with fungi. Kink.com doesn't know the half of it.
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
All species are fungible over long enough periods of time
Click to expand...
And I'll cheerfully bite the hand that feeds me here--if you look in a subtle enough way at features, or these days in a straightforward way at DNA, creatures are a product of their phylogenies. You can breed things to converge in function or form, but there is no escaping history entirely. Whales aren't fish.
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
Essentialism is bad metaphysics but not bad as a rule of thumb. All species are fungible over long enough periods of time, but SF Joe is right that for walking through the world, dogs are recognizable.

Aristotle by the way did not believe that ideal forms were real. His distinction between accidents and essences works very well for directions on how to define things.

Likewise, spoofulation won't work as a metaphysical concept. There isn't a good enough dividing line between the natural and interventions. But numbers of us know it when we see or taste it.
Click to expand...

Ontogeny begets spoofology?
 
I have nothing useful to add about Platonism, but what's going on with the trilingual label? Are they explicitly marketing it to the burgeoning community of Finnish linguists with tastes for moreish wines?

Mark Lipton
 
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