I am deeply troubled by a vexing philosophical puzzle. What puzzles me is: what makes a cola a cola?

You see, the Pepsi-Cola company has just introduced a new "cola" in my neighborhood, a neighborhood which, while I was not looking, has somehow been designated an official "test market." So Pepsi-Cola company is offering we test-marketees a new, clear cola called Crystal Pepsi. They tell us, in all their advertising and on the can itself, that this is a "clear cola." But it doesn't look like a cola, and it doesn't taste like a cola, and, as far as I can tell from the list of ingredients on the label, it doesn't share any common cola ingredients. In fact, in what must be an inadvertent bit of truth in advertising, the label even proclaims "You've never seen a taste like this. Right now, there's a new taste loose on the planet." I even rather like this new taste that's loose on the planet, but it's just that it doesn't taste like a cola. And, forlorn creature that I am, I cannot enjoy any pleasures of the senses when a philosophical conundrum is fevering my brain. So I ask again, what makes a cola a cola?

Plato would have said that a cola is a cola by virtue of being a representation of the absolute idea of cola which exists in the world of pure ideas (which ain't anywhere around here--I can tell you that for sure). Aristotle would have said that a cola is a cola if it has the essential qualities of colaness, which, as I have just pointed out, Crystal Cola does not. A bit later in history the nominalists would have said that a cola is a cola if we all agree to call it that (well I don't agree). The phenomenologists would have said a cola is a cola if it appears to the organs of perception to be a cola (not to my organs of perception it doesn't). So where are we left if all the great philosophies of the ages cannot accommodate the mystery of Crystal Pepsi?

And then it dawned on me. There is another great philosophy which rules our age: the philosophy of mass marketing! Under this thoughtful view, a cola is a cola if the advertisers peddling it can convince us it's a cola. We just have to believe it to make it so. After all, if I buy the right brand of jeans I will enjoy instant romance. A new car will bestow charisma on my character the moment I sign the loan papers. A mere six-pack of beer will cause bikini-clad women to appear magically in my backyard. And if all of this can happen, well then a colorless, bland, uncola soft drink can be a cola, if the Pepsi-Cola company says so, and we don't disagree. And who would be so foolhardy as to disagree with the prevailing philosophy of our age.