[FRIAM] "Brown eggs are local eggs and local eggs are FRESH!"

[thompnickson2 at gmail.com]

The quote in the subject line was (is?) a slogan that Massachusetts egg
farmers offered in Massachusetts shoppers trying to get them to buy their
eggs. It came with a ditty which, if you call me up, I will happily sing for
you.   The back story is that the factory egg producers in neighboring NY
used chickens that produced white eggs.  Like as not, if you were eating a
white egg in MA you were eating an egg that had been shipped in from NY,
hence longer in transit.  So, if the campaign were successful, shoppers
would seek out brown eggs because of their color.  Brownness in  eggs would
be their cue for purchase. If the campaign worked, the freshness would
become epiphenonmenal with respect to their selection criteria.  From the
point of view of Massachusetts egg-producers, the brownness of the eggs was
epiphenomenal.  All they cared about is whether the eggs sold in MA were
from MA This would of course break down if NY farmers started using chickens
that laid brown eggs or Massachusetts farmers started storing eggs before
shipping them.  

 

At Friday's meeting, my mentors urged me to get off the "epiphenomenon"
kick.  I suppose I could instead use the language of semeiotics.  [Pause for
moaning in the distance.]  In this case we could say that the producers were
trying to make brownness a sign of value in eggs.  This works for two quite
distinct reasons:  it works for the consumer because the brown is a sign of
local and local is a sign of fresh; it works for the producers because brown
is a sign of eggs that come from their farms.  

 

Instead of semiotic language, we could use the language of intension and
extension.  [More anguished groans] The marketing campaign works  because
although the intensions of the choices of the two agents are different,
these intensions are both part of the extension of brown eggs in
Massachusetts.  

 

Note also that the slogan is an example of powers and perils of abduction.
The sloganeer first abduces that brown eggs are local and from that category
(local eggs) deduces that the eggs are fresh.  The two steps in the
abduction/deduction process are 

 

These eggs are brown; local eggs are brown; these eggs are local;

Local eggs are fresh; these [brown] eggs are local; these [brown] eggs are
fresh.  

 

The point (to me) is that there is a very simple thread underlying all of
these ways of talking about natural selection phenomena.  Could all this
baroque verbiage be reduced to a simple formula?  

 

Years ago I wrote a paper
<https://www.researchgate.net/publication/239787151_A_system_for_describing_
bird_song_units>  that reduced the terminology of bird song down to three
operations and 5 levels of organization.  In short, the paper showed that
while  scientists had been using several dozen terms, they had, along, only
been talking about three different sorts of thing.  That is the sort of
reduction I would like to do on all this talk of epiphenomena, intension,
extension, function, purpose, cue, side-effect, spandrel, exaptation, blah,
blah-blah, and blah-blah-blah. 

 

Thanks for allowing me to think in your space and on your time. 

 

Nick 

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com <mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com> 

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

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