An Essay On Pie for Pi Day, by Jessie Hall
It has been a while since I last wrote anything, but I do not think it is appropriate for me to go into detail now about what has been occurring in my life with regards to my time in the academy. Things are…not very good, and it has much to do with the University of Toronto’s IHPST (where I currently am). Sigh.
Anyway, the reason for this post is much more pleasant in that it is Pi Day today! A near and dear friend of mine, Jessie Hall (a Ph.D Candidate at the IHPST), was asked to write an example paper for a class that I TA for, and it is so lovely and incredibly sharp, that I asked her if I could share it on here, and she agreed. So, to all of you who really enjoy maths and thinking about maths, this short paper is for you!
J.S. Hall What is pie? Mar. 14, 2019
Among the many great puzzles to which philosophy has turned its gaze, there is perhaps none greater than this: What is pie? We need not invoke the tortured ontologies of objects, nor a metaphysics of language to answer the question. After all, such overwrought philosophical endeavours so often devolve into solipsism. We must instead rely on the natural everyday language, and the natural, everyday ontology of objects, to guide us in our quest. Here, to much eager anticipation, I offer a treatise on pie, derived of the everyday metaphysical suppositions to which pie belongs. I will undertake to answer finally, the pressing question to which so much philosophical energy has been devoted: what is pie?
As I have already laid out, we will not concern ourselves with the typical pretensions of philosophical works: the questions of metaphysics must be laid aside. We must instead aim to clarify the necessary and sufficient conditions of being pie in its proper metaphysical place: wherever pie is beheld, and in whatever cases “pie” is used.[1] As such, we must examine the everyday objects called pie, and the everyday uses of the term “pie” in our linguistic communities.
Let us begin by describing some intuitive notion. Depending on cultural milieu, geography, language, the general representation of pie may differ. Yet here and now, I have an image of pie which can be described thusly: A round pastry, perhaps formed of a glutenous crust, and filled with a delectable concoction inside. But are any of these things that I have just now imagined, necessary properties of pie? Are any of them sufficient on their own to constitute pie? It seems not. Let us examine each in turn.
Must a pie be round? If we had all the constituent ingredients of say, an apple pie, baked and arranged in the typical way, but formed into a square tin, instead of a round one, would it cease to be apple pie? This seems absurd. Similarly, need the crust be glutenous? We can appeal to the use of “pie” here to demonstrate that it need not. For shepherd’s pie is constituted mainly of meat and potatoes, and various pastry pies come in gluten-free varieties, despite nonetheless being called “pies”. Must the filling be delectable? Certainly one can imagine the possibility of a pie that is not to one’s liking. And the contingency of such a property as “delectable” can do our treatment no favours. Suffice it to conclude that neither roundness, nor glutenousness, nor delectability are necessary conditions for being pie.
Our intuitive notion has so far done little to elucidate what is constitutive of pie. Yet there is one property we have not yet attended to: the property of one edible thing’s being filled with something else edible. We must investigate further. Is it the property of containinga filling what makes a pie a pie? Surely we can be more precise. For pie need not involve the wholecontainment of one edible thing by another, for there are pies with and without uniform shells. Moreover, we must think again of the shepherd’s pie, which is not clearly a containment in any usual respect, of one edible thing by another.
Here, it is perhaps relevant to remark that occasionally, for historical reasons, or other idiosyncratic conditions, words stray markedly from the “average” of their family resemblance. Yet if we are to discard shepherd’s pie on these grounds, we risk the dissolution of our project.[2] For we cannot simply assert that certain uses of “pie” are erroneous, when our investigation of the nature of pie in part relies on those very uses of “pie”. Thus, shepherd’s pie must stay. And thus further, we must discard this criterion of ‘part containing part’ for we see plainly the disconfirming instance in shepherd’s pie (and of course, there are others).[3]
At this juncture, it will be instructive to consider some features commonly held to be disqualifying. It is sometimes held by some philosophers of pie that what is not edible is not pie. This is treated as an axiom from which further metaphysical pie claims are to be made. Yet we must interrogate this axiom. If what is not edible is not pie, then mud pies are not pies. And we must be wary of excluding certain pies on the basis of linguistic idiosyncrasy (as has already been mentioned). Moreover, “edible” is a vague predicate. While it may not be advisable to eat certain things we may wish to call pie, that does not mean we cannot.So those philosophers of pie who wish to set out this “edible” foundation to pie must be more specific. And further still, such philosophers who wish to defend the ‘edible’ criterion will find themselves in a linguistic bind, come any use of ‘pie’ a child might invoke in the sandbox, or in the manipulation of play-dough, or some other medium likely to be regarded as “inedible”.
Some pie-metaphysicians are much more strict in their pie foundations, claiming first that what is pie must be edible, and second that what is not pieis whatever edible thing possesses some uniform structure, rather than non-uniform structure. The problems of vagueness are only compounded by this account. For what is it to beuniformin structure? This metaphysical view came out of an outdated and narrow conception of pie that was only defined in counter-distinction to cake. In these debates, pie was differentiated on the basis that a clear perceptual distinction can be drawn between “parts” of pie, a differentiation which could not be made of the “parts” of cake. Yet ambiguity abounds, for what is cake?[4] And what is uniformity such that it can clearly delineate pie from not-pie? Moreover, these metaphysicians do not get what they want out of their schema anyway. If we suppose pie to be merely the conjunction of what is edible and non-uniform, then casseroles, salads, soups, etc. all constitute pie. While this may be a problem for pie-metaphysicians, it is no problem for me. This is because what this treatise has aimed at from the beginning, though perhaps underhandedly, is the revelation that it is in fact the sum total of objects which are pie. That is to say, everything that is, is pie.
Not only are empanadas, hot pockets, cobblers, cheesecakes, pizzas, donuts, and reeses cups pie, but so are cars, books, beds, roadside peach stands, and the Library of Congress. Everything which can be carved out as an object is, in fact, pie. Not as a function of utter methodological solipsism, but as a consequence of the regular, everyday metaphysical suppositions and linguistic uses of the term “pie”. For if there is no stable criteria for constituting pie, then everything and anything is pie, even you. What has been set forth in the preceding is to show that there can be no stable criteria for pie, and thus, QED, everything is pie.
[1]Where I put terms in “quotes” (as demonstrated) I mean to denote the term, or signifier and not its referent.
[2]For an expansion on this idea, see Hall, J. S. (forthcoming) “What is not pie” The Journal for the Genealogy of Not-Important Things Vol. 23 pp. 14-714
[3]For a brief exposition on pies without containment see Real, N. (2015) “Things that are pie that you don’t think should be pie” Journal of Excellent Work on Important Topics Vol. 6 pp. 23-27
[4]For a treatment of cake, see Hall, J.S. (2011) “What is cake?” Ontology of Confectionery Vol. 6 pp. 13-14