I like to drop the Cube Rule of Food into conversations like this. It’s not entirely comprehensive, but it’s a great jumping-off point.
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@Purplecat beat you to it, I’m sad to say.
I do enjoy the Cube Rule. It could certainly be a way to define sandwiches (and other foodstuff categories). It’s certainly not the definition, though. Of course, the beauty and tragedy of the Sandwich Game is that there is no the definition, so I suppose the Cube Rule is as good as anything?
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You’re right, not sure how I missed that. My bad.
The other definition I like was something touched on by @L0ki above - what would the Earl of Sandwich think?
“Does this foodstuff simplify my efforts at a continued and uninterrupted gambling habit?”
So taco is a no, but an eclair is a yes.
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So, he said, fully aware of the irony of even entering the Sandwich Game: a burrito is a sandwich but a smothered burrito is not?
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I don’t think a yes/no answer really fully conveys all the circumstances where one might be asking the question. We need to find a synthesis of the alignment grid, the cube rule, and the earl assessment to really answer this once and for all.
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What about a peanut butter ice cream sandwich?
By the cube rule I think those are both toasts.
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Macaroni Pie is a bread bowl, or maybe sushi in a bread bowl. It’s also Scottish, so the next question is “have they tried deep frying it?”
Shepherds pie is an upside down toast. While trying to find a picture I found one abomination that was made with pastry.
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I wasn’t expecting such a pithy explanation of Wittgenstein’s views in a thread about sandwiches.
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Since the word sandwich is also a verb, wouldn’t any object or objects pressed between two other objects (the latter two being identical or similar) be considered a sandwich?
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Does Snoopy have the Buddha nature?
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My crypto-goal with this thread is to encourage systems thinking. Categories are imposed by humans on the natural world in order to make sense of it. The category is a system; systems are just models that we use to try to make the world coherent to us.
Meanwhile, George E. P. Box reminds us that “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” We could make any sort of categorization we want – whatever method we choose requires us to be “wrong” by discarding some distinguishing information between two like-categorized items – but choosing the right way to categorize for a particular purpose (i.e., choosing the right data to ignore) is the key to that scheme’s success or failure as a tool for comprehending the world. Another way to think of “the right way for a particular purpose” is context. This is why category debates where someone comes in and says “Teeeechnically it’s not X unless Y” are so tedious: when you bring a technical definition to bear in a nontechnical context, you’ve just abandoned the context.
What makes the Sandwich Game fun (and infuriating) is that everyone playing knows that the word “sandwich” means different things in different contexts; the absurd premise of the game is to try to draw sharp boundaries where none are possible – or to blur to meaninglessness the distinctions between the contexts that exist for needing to discriminate sandwiches from not-sandwiches. Solutions like the cube rule are fine as systems in and of themselves – at the very least they are well-bounded and consistent – but obviously when applied meaningfully in a real world context they come up short.
Thank you for reading my newsletter; I encourage you to consider your context when deciding what’s a sandwich and what isn’t.
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There are some pedants who would faint at the sight of ‘pedants’ not having an apostrophe after the ‘s’ in that poster.
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I…I…what happened? I just suddenly came to on the floor with a bruise on my head.
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You may have suffered a catastrophic apostrophic fall.
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More seriously, one of the big problems that I have seen with category debates is that they are often used to attack an argument without actually addressing its substance. I’m not going to call out the particular example I have in mind, but the pattern is something like:
Earnest poster: This position is bad because it embraces X, which is a problematic practice.
Not-quite-trolley: Technically, it’s not X, it’s Y. Check out these many definitions that split hairs in the way that I prefer. (*)
Earnest poster: X or Y, it’s still problematic!
Not-quite-trolley: [continues down this sort of rabbithole]
To be honest, I can’t tell whether Not-Quite trolley is actually intending to trolley or not. But the focus on the peculiarities of whether the earnest poster’s objection is X or Y doesn’t really bear on the Earnest Poster’s position. Whether it’s X or Y, the question is whether the practice is problematic. Not-Quite-trolley might honestly disagree on whether the practice is bad, but framing it as “you are using the wrong word” does nothing to meaningfully address that. They’re not addressing the facts, they’re picking at the expression.
I am sure there’s a term for this sort of rhetorical fallacy, but I can’t summon it to mind…
(* Never mind the frequent case where not every definition discriminating the two terms necessarily splits hairs the same way, so this framing is sometimes pretty dishonestly selective.)
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