My significant other ate cucumbers and onion with some ranch. I called it a cucumber onion salad. She says there aren’t enough ingredients to call it a salad, because “it takes multiple ingredients”. I pointed out she had three and asked what the minimum is. She refuses to answer so I ask Lemmy.

  • blackbrook@mander.xyz
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    1 year ago

    I think this is one of those words / concepts where one needs to invoke Wittgenstein’s “family resemblance” idea. You’re not going to find some exact set of criteria that define what people do and don’t consider a salad. They instead have a “family resemblance”.

    Your probably idea is not a bad way of describing how that works.

    • Badass_panda@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I know, I was being humorous but it is in fact the way most categorization works. Very seldom is it a taxonomy; the way we recognize faces, voices, shapes, etc … it’s all probabilistic.