In a recent poll on the Haunted Magazine facebook chat page it came to be that a ghost hunter's favourite biscuit was a Jaffa Cake, but that was not the end of the discussion, a lot of paranormal peeps were up in arms saying that the Jaffa was not a biscuit, it is a cake as the name suggests, it was literally all out war on the page. So in true investigative journalistic style we dug a hole in a haunted location and looked into it.
This question reheats a confectionery conundrum first raised in 1991. A tax is charged on chocolate-covered biscuits, but not on cakes. The manufacturer, McVities, had always categorised them as cakes and to boost their revenue the tax authorities wanted them recategorised as biscuits. A legal case was fought in front of a brilliant adjudicator, Mr D C Potter. For McVities, this produced a sweet result. The Jaffa Cake has both cake-like qualities and biscuit-like qualities, but Mr Potter's verdict was that, on balance, a Jaffa Cake is a cake.


The immediate implication of Mr Potter's ruling was financial. But Prof Crane says the
question "Cake or Biscuit?" touches on a profound philosophical problem. "How do our concepts relate to reality?" Which aspects of our classification of the world come from the world itself and which come from us? 
NOW COMES THE PHILOSOPHY BIT: There is no record of the 20th Century philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, ever tasting a Jaffa Cake, though there is evidence that he was partial towards a bun. But his ideas are relevant to the Jaffa Cake puzzle. We are tempted to think that every concept must have a strict definition to be usable. But Wittgenstein pointed out that there are many "family-resemblance" concepts, as he called them. Family members can look alike without sharing a single characteristic. Some might have distinctive cheek bones, others a prominent nose, etc. Equally, some concepts can operate with overlapping similarities. Take the concept of "game". Some games involve a ball, some don't. Some involve teams, some don't. Some are competitive, some are not. There is no characteristic that all games have in common. And there is no strict definition of "cake" or "biscuit" that compels us to place the Jaffa Cake under either category. Another temptation is to believe that all that is at stake here is an arbitrary issue of semantics. It is, the thought goes, a mere verbal convention whether one labels a Jaffa Cake a cake or a biscuit. It has nothing to do with the real world. Again a tenuous paranormal link proving that whatever they are they are perfect in the paranormal world.
The distinction between statements that are true as a matter of convention or language ("All triangles have three sides"), and those that make a claim about the empirical world ("It is possible to eat 13 Jaffa Cakes in a minute") - is a longstanding one in philosophy. But in the middle of the last century the American philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine disputed whether such a rigid distinction could be maintained - and Tim Crane agrees with him that it cannot.
"But could Jaffa Cakes be neither cakes nor biscuits - and instead something in between?"
It may be interesting to compare Jaffa Cakes with people here, even though they differ in several ways - most Jaffa Cakes have no opinion about how they should be identified, for example, and most humans are not topped by a thin but scrumptious layer of chocolate. But back to the Jaffa Cake mystery. Cake or biscuit? "Definitely cake," says Tim Crane, echoing the judgement of Mr Potter. This is an assertion about the world, not just about language. A Jaffa Cake, in its essence, is more cake-like than biscuit like. Its cake features are more elemental than its biscuit features.
And with that riddle solved, Haunted Magazine invites ghost hunters all over the UK to their office to partake in a cup of tea and a jaffa or two, or three BUT not four, that's just plain greedy.
#dontbenormal
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