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at Mon, 15 Aug 2005 08:13:57 GMT in
>,
(Jarkko) wrote :
>> > But is not the best chocolate the one, that my/your mouth says is
>> > the best?
>>
>> This is true, but you're making the assumption that people throughout
>> the world have ACCESS to samples of the best chocolates, and that the
>> masses have made their decision based on that.
>
>Let's say I have two chocolate bars, bar1 and bar2. Let's also say that
>I have never seen or heard of any other chocolates in the world. I eat
>these two bars and I like bar2 more than bar1. Does that not make bar2
>the best chocolate in the world from my point of view ?
No, or at least not necessarily. If you base your opinion of what is
"best" entirely on things you've already tried, you've already limited
yourself drastically in that your world-view is confined entirely to your
personal experience. However, the majority of people, I think, don't assess
things this way. Rather, most people conjure up an "archetype" - an
idealised, abstract description of what the "perfect" exemplar of the item
in question would be, and apply the term "best" to such things as come
closest to that archetype. Furthermore, if nothing they've experienced
approaches that archetype very closely, then they just don't call anything
the "best". Thus, for example, a person who's driven only a Honda and a
Ford would probably still be quite likely to call a Mercedes a "better"
car, possibly even the "best", even though he himself has never driven it.
People readily acknowledge the existence of better products than those of
their own experience and are often even not afraid to pronounce something
they've never tried "best".
Pedantic grammatical technicality: Actually, in the situation you describe
if you are to apply your logic naively, then no, it doesn't make bar2 the
best chocolate in the world. It makes it the *better* chocolate in the
world. (Use of the superlative implies at least 3 objects under comparison)
>> most Americans have never even tasted
>> another chocolate than Hershey's or Nestle. In fact, most probably
>> don't know that another kind of chocolate exists!
>
>This is truly sad if this is the case. I'm sure that nobody in Finland
>(me included, naturally) knows of all tho chocolates in the world, but
>I'm equally sure that 90% of grownup finns know at leat a couple of
>foreign chocolates, because at least two dozen brands and 4-6
>chocolatemakers products scan be found in any supermarket in Finland.
Perhaps this is the first thing to learn - that availabilities aren't the
same everywhere. It's easy to assume from your own local POV that people
will have access to a certain breadth of selection, but this isn't
necessarily the case. The situation described above isn't far off being
true in the USA. Let's also not forget that probably for a majority of the
world the point is completely moot: they have never tasted or had access to
*any* chocolate at all, of any brand.
--
Alex Rast
(remove d., .7, not, and .NOSPAM to reply)
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