I was cruising the booze aisle in the local supermarket yesterday in search of wines for Thursday's Thanksgiving feast. I got into conversation with a friendly twenty-something dude who worked there. I said I was looking for sweet vermouth. He thought it was used to make martinis and so I explained that martinis call for dry vermouth while the sweet stuff is an ingredient in manhattans. He then enthused about some whisky he had been drinking. I asked whether it was a scotch or a bourbon. He replied, "It's whisky." I then explained that whisky is to scotch, bourbon, rye, etc. as genus to species and that one couldn't drink whisky unless one drank scotch or bourbon, or . . . . This didn't seem to register.
But it did remind me of another twenty-something dude whose comment about the church he attended prompted me to ask what Protestant denomination he belonged to. He said. "I am a Presbyterian, not a Protestant."
These two incidents then put me in mind of a story Hegel tells somewhere, perhaps it's in the Lesser Logic. A man goes to the grocer to buy fruit. The grocer shows him apples, oranges, pears, cherries . . . . Our man rejects each suggestion, insisting that he wants fruit. He learns that fruit as such is not to be had.