The Wax Apple Distinction

A wax apple looks exactly like an apple. It has the colour, the shape, the sheen. Place it in a bowl with real apples and a casual observer cannot spot the difference. But the wax apple does not nourish. It did not grow on a tree. It was not produced by the biological processes — photosynthesis, cell division, sugar transport, ripening — that make a real apple what it is. The product looks the same. The process that produced it is categorically different. Midgley used this simple image to illuminate one of the most consequential distinctions in philosophy: the difference between something that resembles another thing on the surface and something that is fundamentally the same kind of thing. The distinction has become urgent in the AI era because large language models are wax apple factories at planetary scale, producing linguistic objects that look like the products of understanding without involving the process that understanding consists of.