
The epistemology of pizza - phillord
http://www.russet.org.uk/blog/3128
======
pfooti
A diversion into the pedantic, but hear me out: I'm legitimately interested in
terminology here.

This actually seems more like ontology work than epistemology work. In one of
my academic fields (I do software, education, and the learning sciences), we
tend to use the term "epistemology" to be knowledge about knowledge itself.
Generally questions like "where does the ontology of pizza come from?", or
"who has claim on saying what is and is not a pizza, and where do they derive
that claim?" are epistemological ones, and mapping out the state of different
claims are ontological ones.

Is 'epistemology', as used here to mean more of a meta-ontology a common word
usement that's being structured these days? Is it something from clojure or
one of the other lisp-y spaces people are building ontologies? I played with
building ontologies _about_ epistemology (specifically, nature of science,
quality of scientific claim, etc) using KQML back in the Dark Ages of 2000 or
so, but haven't really looked at the work since then.

~~~
phillord2
I am using the term "ontology" to mean "a description of truth", and
"epistemology" to mean "how do we know what truth is". Of course, these are
philosophical definitions, which (as the article says) are not necessarily
that applicable.

The article in question uses OWL -- which is a subset of first order logic --
to illustrate the point. Clojure is (in this article) just a syntactic
wrapping.

~~~
pfooti
Ah, that certainly makes sense. The article was a hoot, BTW - speaking as both
a philosophy geek and food geek.

~~~
phillord
Thank you!

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_ZeD_
As a barese, I cannot let it go: here in Bari there is a total separation
between pizza and focaccia. I know in other parts of Italy the difference is
smoothered, but

A pizza is only made in pizzeria, is baked directly into the wood stove, over
the marble

A focaccia is only made in panificio, is baked into a baking tray

Btw a focaccia barese is a total specific thing (always with oil, olive, and
tomato pieces) it was a shock to know this thing does not exist outiside my
city

~~~
lucaspiller
This is the big issue with 'defining' pizza and many other Italian dishes -
Italians themselves can't decide how it should be and love to debate these
things over and over (usually while eating food)!

Carbonara is another highly debated dish - here in Roma (where it is was
supposedly born ~50 years ago) some people insist you only need egg, where as
others insist you need egg and cheese (and then there is the debate over what
cheese). I've heard some restaurants stopped serving the dish to prevent
heated arguments with their customers.

Even the word for bags in a supermarket can't be agreed on. Here we use
"buste", where as in the north they use "sacchetto". Our word there means
envelope, so obviously you will get a funny look if you ask for three
envelopes when paying for your groceries (the joke is on us though, we use
that word for envelope too :P).

Further reading:

[http://www.seriouseats.com/2016/02/origins-history-of-
roman-...](http://www.seriouseats.com/2016/02/origins-history-of-roman-pasta-
gricia-amatriciana-carbonara.html)

~~~
toothbrush
_> Even the word for bags in a supermarket can't be agreed on. Here we use
"buste", where as in the north they use "sacchetto". Our word there means
envelope, so obviously you will get a funny look if you ask for three
envelopes when paying for your groceries (the joke is on us though, we use
that word for envelope too :P)._

Ha, that reminds me of _sac_ in the north of France versus _poche_ (the word
northerners would use for the thing in their trousers) as used in the
south(-west?) to designate a plastic bag in a supermarket...

------
curiousgal
Coincidentally, the volume of a cylinder of a radius _z_ and a height _a_ is
_Pi.z.z.a_

~~~
bitwize
...and dr³ factors into r²dr, or rdrr... get it? Hardy har har!

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anthonybsd
What in the world did I just read? Fascinating, but...

~~~
anewhnaccount2
The fruits of twenty years semantic web research.

~~~
phillord
It's about pizza not fruit.

This article is light-hearted of course. But there are food ontologies for
real -- the BBC have one for organising their recipes. And there is another
which is used for food crops, which is used for research into disease (of the
crops), and helping to alleviate hunger.

~~~
divbyzer0
Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit, wisdom is not putting it in a
fruit salad.

~~~
gpderetta
Then again, there is nothing wrong with putting tomatoes in a fruit salad, or
a mixed vegetables/fruits salad, which is delicious.

------
miguelrochefort
It is a mistake to seek universality when dealing with semantics and
ontologies. The world is perceived and understood differently by every
witness.

The solution is to allow every agent to either support or disapprove of every
semantic statement. This way, the same query will output different realities
depending on the agent's opinions, preferences, and network of trust.

Imagine a knowledge base where Jesus statistically both exists and doesn't
exists, depending on who wants to know. A knowledge base where some food item
is both a pizza and not a pizza. There's no way around it, and this will
become the start of a new semantic marketplace.

~~~
phillord
I wrote a different version of the pizza ontology years ago, where the level
of "spiciness" was dependent on the country you came from -- so American "hot"
was equivalent to British "Medium".

It's hard to do, ontologically, but you can. It tends to make your ontology
very complex though, and at the same time incapable (because it's hard to
detect contradictions). So you should only do it when you need to.

------
fibo
> a pizza bianca without mozzarella is a focaccia

It is completely wrong! Pizza and focaccia have a completely different
mixture.

~~~
kidmenot
To complicate the matter, if you ever find yourself in the Italian region of
Apulia (and possibly other southern regions), you should say "focaccia" even
though you really mean "pizza", because "pizza" stands for "penis".

~~~
gpderetta
[citation needed]. My wife is from Apulia, and we visit the region multiple
times a year. Never heard of this, always called a 'pizza' by its name there.

~~~
kidmenot
[https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cazzo](https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cazzo)

Look for "Puglia". Looks like what I said is true for Taranto, but my ex
girlfriend was from Brindisi and she was the one who told me about this.

Might depend on whether you actually speak dialect, methinks.

~~~
gpderetta
Great citation, have an upvote.

My wife is from the southern Salento where, as the wikipage itself shows, a
different term is used. As it is common in Italy often dialects radically
change withing a dozen kilometers.

Anyway, I do have good friends from Taranto, and this never came up; then
again, there are so many synonyms of 'penis' in Italian and its dialects that
if we were to avoid all of them we would have to rip out half of the
dictionary.

~~~
kidmenot
True that :) Yes, dialects change even from my hometown to the next, which is
at about 30 km. They have a similar but different word for "Thursday", for
instance. Not to mention the change in accents within the same province.

This kind of richness is going to get lost as fewer and fewer people are
taught the dialect of their own region (I reckon many parents think it is
"uncool" or something), but I'm getting off topic :)

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anonbanker
Someone should combine this data with Jeff Varasano's Recipe[0]. Then we could
actually make a good pizza.

0\.
[http://www.varasanos.com/PizzaRecipe.htm](http://www.varasanos.com/PizzaRecipe.htm)

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coreyp_1
I have been living in Rome for 2 1/2 months, and I _still_ can't figure out a
consensus on what the different types of pizza are!

I miss Pizza Hut stuffed-crust pepperoni (with pretzel crust flavor)!!!!

~~~
fibo
In fact Rome is not the right place to understand what is pizza. You should go
Naples. Keep in mind that Italy is made of a lot, really a lot of cultures. It
is not the same to stay in Naples than in Rome. Naples was a Greek colony,
Rome was an Etruscan colony. If you are in Rome you can understand what is
carbonara, matriciana, abbacchio, etc. If you ask for a pizza you are astray.

~~~
spdionis
Although I agree with you I would take note that Naples being a Greek colony
and Rome an Etruscan colony do not have much to do with differences in pizza
matters. Those societies and the appearance of pizza have a couple of millenia
between them.

~~~
jacobush
Not so sure about that ... old habits die hard. In albanian "pite" is a pizza
like bread. And albanians and greek cultures shared some stuff.

------
riordan
Friends don't let friends use RDF

------
Overtonwindow
"Time is money, money is power, power is pizza, and pizza is knowledge...."

\- April Ludgate

~~~
taneq
The volume of a cylinder with radius Z and height A is PiZZA.

