On the Semantics of Biscuits
A philosopher proved the biscuit undefinable; the caretaker named it in a word
The Committee, having exhausted itself upon efficiency, sought refreshment, and it was over the tea trolley that our gravest crisis began.
A plate arrived bearing objects that some present called biscuits and others, with equal conviction, called cookies.
The Chair, sensing a question too profound for a mere committee, resolved to convene a public hearing and to summon a philosopher.
Professor Vane arrived in a cloud of qualifications, and began by declaring that the very framing of the question was, epistemologically, a category error.
A biscuit, he explained, is not a thing but a relation, upon flour, culture, humidity, and the unexamined assumptions of the observer.
He spoke for forty minutes without a full stop, deploying subordinate clauses the way a fortress deploys walls: to keep meaning at a safe distance.
The Treasurer, brave beyond his station, asked whether the object on the plate was, in the end, a biscuit.
Professor Vane replied that to answer would be to privilege one regime over another, and that he had not come all this way to be vulgar.
He introduced a distinction between the biscuit-in-itself, forever unknowable, and the biscuit-for-us, which crumbles the instant we attend to it.
Councillor Adeyemi proposed that we simply taste one and decide, and was informed that taste, being , settled nothing and offended .
The philosopher then subdivided the question into , whether the biscuit exists, and , whether we could ever know that it did.
By the second hour, the biscuits themselves had gone stale, thereby, Professor Vane noted with satisfaction, resolving the matter in favour of .
I recorded that no definition survived contact with a second example, each biscuit differing from the last in ways that no rule could contain.
A silence fell as the room contemplated that if a biscuit could not be defined, perhaps nothing could.
Prewitt, ever literal, observed that his grandmother had defined a biscuit for sixty years by baking one, and had never once consulted a philosopher.
This intervention was praised as charmingly pre-theoretical and set gently aside.
Professor Vane concluded, triumphantly, that the hearing had proved the impossibility of definition, and therefore the impossibility of truth itself.
The Committee, delighted to have escalated a snack into an abyss, thanked him and voted to table the concept of the biscuit indefinitely.
It was resolved that, pending a universal theory of categories, the objects on the plate would be referred to, , as edible units of contested identity.
I noted that the tea, at least, had cooled into an unambiguous fact, and that no one had thought to interrogate it.
Professor Vane departed, leaving behind an remarkable for its precision, itemised to the penny, admitting no ambiguity whatever.
It occurred to me that a man who cannot define a biscuit can nonetheless define his fee, and that some truths survive philosophy by being owed.
The citizen's pavement, meanwhile, remained tilted, and, being neither biscuit nor cookie, escaped our deliberations entirely.
We had gathered to decide what a thing was, and had proven, at length and at expense, only that we could not.
In the margin I wrote that the plainest question, asked seriously enough, becomes unanswerable, and that this is called scholarship.
The plate was cleared by a caretaker who, asked what she had removed, said biscuits, and was, of course, entirely right.
She had settled in one word what the hearing could not settle in a day, and she did it, I noticed, without a single footnote.