Ron’s Blog

Taxonomizing Halloween candy

Oz went trick-or-treating in our neighborhood, and came home with a bag of candy.  We don’t let him eat much, but he was totally into the idea of organizing and taxonomizing the loot.  So, there’s the chocolate bars, the fruit candies, the chocolate bag candy, the gum, and so on.  Of course, there are hard decisions to make — e.g., does blow-pop (like a Tootsie Roll Pop, but with gum on the inside) count as sucker or as gum? 

But more interesting are the decisions about refining the categories.  So, when he noticed that the non-fruit bag candy was all M&M’s except for a few Whoppers, he struggled with whether the real natural kind was M&M’s, where Whoppers would then go into the anomaly pile.  And Reeses cups seemed like they should go with the chocolate bars, but they just don’t fit the definition — do we need to re-name the group to allow them?