Topic 13 - Shared knowledge and absurdist drama (Session A) > More about shared schematic knowledge > Task A

More about shared schematic knowledge

Task A – Schematic knowledge about objects

We use dinner forks to spear or hold food and put it in to our mouths, and this function determines to a large degree what the permissible variation is. Dinner forks need to be small enough to hold in one hand and move food from plate to mouth. So the garden fork, although a fork, is ruled out because it is much too large for the job.

The spear fails on size grounds too, but also because it only has one tine – the pointed part which can be stuck into the object being speared. Schematically, forks typically have three or four tines, as this number is optimum for the task. A ‘two tines’ configuaration is also possible, though we have never seen one with just one tine. It would be possible to imagine a dinner fork with five tines or more, though we can’t ever remember seeing one. Ten tines seem well beyond the bounds of possibility, though.

Chopsticks have the same function as the fork, but come from a culture with different assumptions concerning food preparation. Dinner forks are usually held in the left hand in Europe, and the right hand has a knife with which to cut the food, which can be put on the plate in large chunks needing to be cut before eating. Cultures which use chopsticks do not have dinner knives and usually cut the food into small pieces prior to cooking. So a knife is not necessary and the ‘spearing’ function of the fork also unnecessary (indeed, it is usually considered inelegant in chopstick cultures to spear a largish lump of food with your chopsticks).

The hand can also be used in some cultures to perform the ‘shovelling’ function of the fork, and it is arguable that the fingers are the rough equivalent of the tines of a fork. But although the hand may be thought of as a rough equivalent to a fork it can never count as an actual fork as the fork needs to be an object, not a body part, which can be held in one hand.

This leaves us with three dinner forks in the original set in Task A. They are all roughly (but not exactly) the same, and they all have a set of tines, which would be made of a cheap, hard metal and a handle. The handle can vary in composition (metal, wood, bone, plastic) and shape to some degree, and the overall size can vary too, as the drawings show. But all these variations are within fairly small limits, constrained by the function of the dinner fork. So these seem to be the schematic assumptions we have about forks. Interestingly, all of our pictures of dinner forks have four tines – we couldn’t find any usable pictures on the internet which had more or less. This suggests that although two, three or five tines are possible, four tines is probably part of our schematic assumptions for the dinner fork.

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