Well, Socrates, I am happy to tell you what a sandwich is

September 10, 2015 4:00 AM

Is this a sandwich? Teaching the Platonic Dialogues through sandwiches. A philosophy professor thinks of a new way to get her students to think about the Socratic method.

Relevant quote: "It makes one wistful when one contemplates all the horrors that have been perpetrated in the name of a certainty based on nothing. If we can’t even define 'sandwich,' how can we possibly presume to define 'truth,' or 'justice,' or 'freedom'?

It’s true that each day we must make choices and decide what is the best thing to do. We can’t truly inhabit a world where there is no truth and words don’t mean anything, as even the most staunchly postmodernist philosophers have demonstrated. But how much better things would be if we at least recognized our own fallibility, our own essential blindness and lack of understanding in the face of the unimaginable complexity of the universe, our own knowledge that 'all we know is that we know nothing.'"

posted by colfax (139 comments total)

I still do not want to eat lunch with Mike.
posted by louche mustachio at 4:02 AM on September 10, 2015 [3 favorites]

It seems very simple to me. A sandwich consists of two or more pieces of cooked grain products, separated by seasoning or other food between them. For instance, a bowl of cereal and a packet of buttered popcorn are both sandwiches.
posted by Joe in Australia at 4:15 AM on September 10, 2015 [11 favorites]

Bread / Filling / Bread
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 4:29 AM on September 10, 2015 [2 favorites]

Joe in Australia, I refute you thus: nothing joins the halves of an open-faced sandwich, yet as its name indicates, it is most clearly a sandwich. One aporia on sourdough, hold the mayo.
posted by informavore at 4:34 AM on September 10, 2015

I'd kill for a sandwich right now.
posted by Nanukthedog at 4:42 AM on September 10, 2015 [1 favorite]

Also none of this explains the KFC double down. I mean they call it a sandwich. Are you all saying the Colonel is an idiot?
posted by Nanukthedog at 4:44 AM on September 10, 2015 [3 favorites]

I ask them to tell me what a table is.


They are surprised to find out that Tony Hawk rides a table around all of the time.
posted by oddman at 4:45 AM on September 10, 2015 [4 favorites]

“There is an art to the business of making sandwiches which it is given to few ever to find the time to explore in depth. It is a simple task, but the opportunities for satisfaction are many and profound.”

― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide : Five Complete Novels and One Story
posted by esto-again at 4:51 AM on September 10, 2015 [5 favorites]

I got to the bit about the pizza on top of another pizza sandwich, and then all I could think about was eating a pizza-pizza sandwich for the rest of the article. Although now I think about it that's kind of a calzone. Are all sandwiches calzones? Is piety a calzone? I need a lie down.
posted by threecheesetrees at 4:55 AM on September 10, 2015 [16 favorites]

A thing is a thing which is defined by the definition of the thing, except for the inevitable edge cases at the fringes of the definition of the thing which exist no matter how carefully the definition of the thing is refined.
posted by kyrademon at 4:57 AM on September 10, 2015 [2 favorites]

I'm fine with calling the double-down a sandwich. I mean, after all, the chicken is breaded, so it's basically two layers of bread with other stuff (including more bread!) inside it. So if a Big Mac is a sandwich, then so is a double down.
posted by vernondalhart at 5:02 AM on September 10, 2015 [1 favorite]

Ah, but what is a wrap? I put it to you that a wrap is also a sandwich.
posted by GrammarMoses at 5:05 AM on September 10, 2015

I love good teaching methods! And sandwiches.
posted by ChuraChura at 5:11 AM on September 10, 2015

I refute you thus: nothing joins the halves of an open-faced sandwich, yet as its name indicates, it is most clearly a sandwich.

I recently had the revelation that eggs benedict are just an open-faced breakfast sandwich, and have annoyed my friends since by pointing it out every time we're at brunch.
posted by mayonnaises at 5:17 AM on September 10, 2015 [11 favorites]

threecheesetrees, you'd better sit down for this one.
posted by escape from the potato planet at 5:17 AM on September 10, 2015 [4 favorites]

All things are sandwiches, and sandwiches are all things.

Hallowed be the sandwich, and yummy may it remain.

Amen!
posted by blue_beetle at 5:20 AM on September 10, 2015 [1 favorite]

I shall not today attempt to define a sandwich, and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so.

But I know a sandwich when I see one.

(And if I don't see a sandwich, then I make one. And when I see that sandwich, I eat it. And then I don't see a sandwich again, so...)
posted by jammy at 5:25 AM on September 10, 2015 [5 favorites]

I am happy for him that his little class experiment went well. Because when it comes to the "Is a hot dog a sandwich?" debate, there's only two possible outcomes -- genial agreement to disagree and the death of one of the parties. My experience moderating the thread on the subject on Chowhound suggests that the two outcomes are about equally likely.
posted by jacquilynne at 5:32 AM on September 10, 2015 [6 favorites]

Language isn't a mirror to reality but a lens through which we see and interpret reality. So a sandwich is what everyone currently talking about sandwiches agrees a sandwich is.

Mmmmmmmm.... open-faced club sand wedge
posted by eustacescrubb at 5:35 AM on September 10, 2015 [4 favorites]

This is all because Pirsig inexplicably left Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations out of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
posted by srboisvert at 5:36 AM on September 10, 2015 [3 favorites]

Its sandwiches all the way down.
posted by frijole at 5:38 AM on September 10, 2015

Also, I always saw the "wrap" as a gentrified burrito.
posted by eustacescrubb at 5:38 AM on September 10, 2015 [17 favorites]

Woah there pizza cake! I can't even... I don't know what to.... Speechless... Deliciously speechless.
posted by threecheesetrees at 5:39 AM on September 10, 2015

I'll have to read this more closely later, but I remain unconvinced that the sandwich thought experiment says anything about idealism. To me it's always been a demonstration of a certain aspect of language. Namely: sometimes nouns don't have hard-edged definitions, which divide the world into "definitely this" and "definitely not-this". Sometimes their edges are blurrier—and that's a feature, not a bug. "Sandwich", like many culinary terms such as "soup" and "salad", is more like a constellation of features—and the more of those features an object exhibits, the more likely we are to call it "sandwich" (or "soup" or "salad" or what-have-you). Some objects will, necessarily, fall in a gray area.

But there's no reason to suppose that this constellation—this ideal—is, in any sense, the reality. The physical sandwich—the actual, edible foodstuff consisting of actual bread/condiments/meat/cheese/veggies/etc.—is the reality. "Sandwich" is the just the label, the mental/linguistic construct we use to make sense of the reality after the fact.

As with most philosophical exercises, this one seems to me like playing games with (and missing the point of) language.
posted by escape from the potato planet at 5:44 AM on September 10, 2015 [6 favorites]

"Is Pious pious cause God loves pious?
Socrates asked whose bias do y'all seek?
All for Plato, screech"

Jay-Z got it, and without resorting to the interrogation of sandwichness.
posted by eustacescrubb at 5:45 AM on September 10, 2015 [3 favorites]

[escape from the potato planet] "Sandwich" is the just the label, the mental/linguistic construct we use to make sense of the reality after the fact.

The problem with looking at it this way is it fails to account for how I can already recognise things as a sandwich, to which no-one has provided a label. Or when I engage in making a "sandwich" what am I actually doing ? - particularly if I add a filling that I have never seen used in a sandwich before? How do I know that I am still making a sandwich?
posted by mary8nne at 5:52 AM on September 10, 2015 [3 favorites]

I refute you thus: nothing joins the halves of an open-faced sandwich, yet as its name indicates, it is most clearly a sandwich.

An open-faced sandwich is only ever a mimic of an established, closed sandwich: fried egg on toasted bread is an open-faced breakfast sandwich, while beans on toast is just beans on toast, as there is no widely-recognized toasted baked bean sandwich. Therefore I would say that the "between two pieces of bread" definition holds, with things like open-faced sandwiches and, yes, even the double-down gaining the title of "sandwich" primarily as a metaphor, referencing the proper sandwiches that these other meals refer to.
posted by Peevish at 5:53 AM on September 10, 2015 [10 favorites]

A sandwich is filling between bread, usually two slices of bread. When you are "making a sandwich" you are putting something between two slices of bread. "Open-faced sandwiches" are not sandwiches. The proof is simple: if you take two halves of an open-faced sandwich and put them together, you have just made a sandwich out of it. How could you have made a sandwich if it was already a sandwich?
posted by graymouser at 5:56 AM on September 10, 2015 [10 favorites]

Woah there pizza cake! I can't even... I don't know what to.... Speechless... Deliciously speechless.

Saw on Twitter (blocked at work, or I'd link to it directly) something to the effect of "My 4 year old started calling lasagna 'pizza cake' and I'm not sure I'm going to stop him".
posted by Rock Steady at 6:03 AM on September 10, 2015 [5 favorites]

If I take a pile of sand, and another pile of sand, and put them together, I still have a pile of sand.

Ergo, just because two open faced sandwiches can be combined into a sandwich, does not in itself disprove that the open faced sandwich was a sandwich.
posted by emilyw at 6:04 AM on September 10, 2015 [6 favorites]

Sandwiches, interesting. Here I thought the young 'uns turned to Taylor Swift for their grounding in Socratic dialogue, just as they do for the rest of life's important lessons.
posted by sardonyx at 6:24 AM on September 10, 2015

If I take a sandwich (2 slices of bread and filling), invert it, and put it on top of another sandwich (2 slices of bread and filling), then I still have two sandwiches, not one large sandwich. You can tell because there is nothing between the two middle slices of bread. If I take an open-faced sandwich (1 slice of bread and topping), invert it, and put it on top of another open-faced sandwich (1 slice of bread and topping), then I have one sandwich. Operationally, the open-faced sandwich is different.
posted by graymouser at 6:25 AM on September 10, 2015 [2 favorites]

I'm just happy that I have this infinite, Zeno-brand Sandwich that never goes away because I just keep eating half of it at a time.
posted by mrjohnmuller at 6:30 AM on September 10, 2015 [9 favorites]

Socrates: the original concern troll.
posted by clvrmnky at 6:36 AM on September 10, 2015 [5 favorites]

Related Questions
Is cereal soup?
Is quiche pie?
How much deviled egg is a deviled egg?
posted by Rock Steady at 6:42 AM on September 10, 2015 [3 favorites]

How could you have made a sandwich if it was already a sandwich?

Obviously I can make a sandwich whose ingredients include, inter alia, another piece of bread. (Witness the Big Mac, with its interstitial bun.) So there is no reason I can't make a sandwich that has another sandwich as part of its filling; as emilyw notes, sandwiches may be combined to form larger sandwiches. The open-faced sandwich remains a sandwich in good standing.

Also, gazpacho is just wet salad.
posted by informavore at 6:56 AM on September 10, 2015 [3 favorites]

As with most philosophical exercises, this one seems to me like playing games with (and missing the point of) language.

Quite to the contrary, this illuminates an important feature of language and, by extension, knowledge and discourse: that it becomes, as you note, blurry at the margins. Why is this feature important? Because the margins are where the action is. The margins are where the important court cases are decided; they are where we recognize, or fail to recognize, the rights and dignity of people very different from ourselves; they are where we extend, or fail to extend, workforce protections to people who might or might not be employees. I rather like then-Senator Obama's statement regarding the confirmation of John Roberts to the Supreme Court for this:

The problem I face -- a problem that has been voiced by some of my other colleagues, both those who are voting for Mr. Roberts and those who are voting against Mr. Roberts -- is that while adherence to legal precedent and rules of statutory or constitutional construction will dispose of 95% of the cases that come before a court, so that both a Scalia and a Ginsburg will arrive at the same place most of the time on those 95% of the cases -- what matters on the Supreme Court is those 5% of cases that are truly difficult.

In those cases, adherence to precedent and rules of construction and interpretation will only get you through the 25th mile of the marathon. That last mile can only be determined on the basis of one's deepest values, one's core concerns, one's broader perspectives on how the world works, and the depth and breadth of one's empathy.

In those 5% of hard cases, the constitutional text will not be directly on point. The language of the statute will not be perfectly clear. Legal process alone will not lead you to a rule of decision. In those circumstances, your decisions about whether affirmative action is an appropriate response to the history of discrimination in this country, or whether a general right of privacy encompasses a more specific right of women to control their reproductive decisions, or whether the Commerce Clause empowers Congress to speak on those issues of broad national concern that may be only tangentially related to what is easily defined as interstate commerce, whether a person who is disabled has the right to be accommodated so they can work alongside those who are nondisabled -- in those difficult cases, the critical ingredient is supplied by what is in the judge's heart.

The blurriness at the margins is important because it's not some weird corner of language: it is language. You don't get to 100% without that weird 5% at the end. To say that this exercise misses the point of language is to make language a subset of itself; to cut off the weird bits because they don't seem to fit. What the exercise does is illuminate the weird bit of language by drawing attention to the edge cases of a particular term. To say "this is not the point of language" is very much like saying "I know how to define a sandwich." Really? You do?
posted by gauche at 6:56 AM on September 10, 2015 [33 favorites]

Just one of the many questions for which the XKCD survey (very recently) will finally provide a definitive answer.
posted by kleinsteradikaleminderheit at 6:59 AM on September 10, 2015 [1 favorite]

informavore, the Big Mac passes the invert-and-stack test, which the open-faced sandwich does not. Two Big Macs, one atop the other, do not constitute a Bigger Mac; they remain Big Macs. But if you took the bottom bun and filling of one Big Mac (an open-faced creation that we'll call the "Little Mac") and put a Big Mac atop it, you would in fact have created a "Bigger Mac." And the Bigger Mac would itself pass the invert-and-stack test in a way that the Little Mac wouldn't.
posted by graymouser at 7:01 AM on September 10, 2015 [2 favorites]

Also, I always saw the "wrap" as a gentrified burrito.

You mean taking a thing, removing all of the distinct character and flavor that made it great, and driving up the price, leaving it an expensive empty shell of what it once was?

Spot on.
posted by leotrotsky at 7:04 AM on September 10, 2015 [5 favorites]

Add enough gravy and you'll discover that the concept of sandwich-being is a continuum, the other end being a pile of soggy crusts and debris.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 7:06 AM on September 10, 2015

graymouser, the test seems to rely on the notion that two slices of bread in contact always constitute a sandwich-sandwich boundary, which I dispute. It's not true for two layers of the same filling in general: otherwise, two meat patties placed in contact would also make a sandwich boundary, which would constitute an impossibility proof of the double cheeseburger. Clearly that's absurd.

So if I can make a sandwich in which two filling elements of the same type are in contact, I can do it with bread as well. The fact that bread is typically used as the outer boundary of a sandwich doesn't prohibit this, since (as the Big Mac shows) bread can also live happily as a filling. Whether those stacked Big Macs constitute a Bigger Mac depends on pragmatic factors, e.g., whether I intend to treat the whole as a single megasandwich to be consumed.

I'm also happy to say that there exists both a single Bigger Mac and also two small Big Macs, and that they're spatially overlapping. The problem of the many just means more sandwiches, after all.
posted by informavore at 7:17 AM on September 10, 2015 [2 favorites]

And now I want to write an Inform 7 script that painstakingly defines the process of sandwich-building. And also I'm hungry.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 7:17 AM on September 10, 2015 [1 favorite]

Because when it comes to the "Is a hot dog a sandwich?" debate, there's only two possible outcomes -- genial agreement to disagree and the death of one of the parties.

Allow me to settle this once and for all.
posted by murphy slaw at 7:18 AM on September 10, 2015 [1 favorite]

While y'all were debating, I ate all of your sandwiches.
posted by louche mustachio at 7:25 AM on September 10, 2015 [1 favorite]

This reminds me of two very important quotes, one Jammy beat me to, the other Chris Knight:

[in response to being asked what he was doing sitting on the roof]
Self-realization. I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, who said, "... I drank what?"
posted by Pax at 7:30 AM on September 10, 2015 [1 favorite]

So I think they're wrong in their definitions. My proof:

Weiner Sandwich (aka Hot Dog): Sandwich ✓
Ground Beef Sandwich on Flatbread (aka Taco): Sandwich ✓
Bread Sandwich (aka Three Pieces of Bread (or Big Mac hold the meat)): Sandwich ✓
Pizza Sandwich (aka 2 pieces of Pizza): Sandwich ✓
Lasagna: This is a where I take offense. Lasagna is not "stuff between bread", as lasagna doesn't have bread on the outside, it has cheese and/or sauce. If you put the noodles on the outside you've made terrible lasagna. Not Sandwich ✗
Open-Faced Sandwich: ½ a sandwich is still all sandwich ✓
posted by blue_beetle at 7:34 AM on September 10, 2015 [3 favorites]

Open-Faced Sandwich: ½ a sandwich is still all sandwich

This introduces the Crouton Exception to the otherwise stable Sandwich-Salad Boundary.
posted by gauche at 7:36 AM on September 10, 2015 [2 favorites]

I do not see what you mean, Socrates. Surely a stack of pieces of bread is simply a loaf of bread, as any man knows.

I thought that we were all familiar toast sandwich by now.
posted by oh.ghoulin at 7:37 AM on September 10, 2015 [4 favorites]

Ice cream sandwich.
posted by Pax at 7:39 AM on September 10, 2015

GP: Is Eris true?
M2: Everything is true.
GP: Even false things?
M2: Even false things are true.
GP: How can that be?
M2: I don't know man, I didn't do it.
posted by Reverend John at 7:42 AM on September 10, 2015 [3 favorites]

mary8anne: The problem with looking at it this way is it fails to account for how I can already recognise things as a sandwich, to which no-one has provided a label. Or when I engage in making a "sandwich" what am I actually doing ? - particularly if I add a filling that I have never seen used in a sandwich before? How do I know that I am still making a sandwich?

Huh? You've simply validated my point. If the notion "sandwich" is a constellation of traits that includes things like "is edible", "contains one or more ingredients partially enclosed in some kind of bread", "is layered", "is horizontally layered", "has two solid, homogenous ingredients as the outermost layers", etc.—then that's how I know it's a sandwich. Because the object before me exhibits a number of those traits (not necessarily all of them).

I'm not denying the existence of an idealized sandwich—I'm affirming it. I'm just denying the primacy of the ideal—the notion that our mental concept of "sandwich" refers to some mystical Ur-sandwich which has reality outside of our own minds.
posted by escape from the potato planet at 7:46 AM on September 10, 2015 [3 favorites]

While y'all were debating, I ate all of your sandwiches.

Ah, but were they?
posted by kleinsteradikaleminderheit at 7:46 AM on September 10, 2015

Weiner Sandwich (aka Hot Dog): Sandwich ✓

A weiner (aka weeny, possibly burnt) sandwich is not the same as a hot dog because it involves bread rather than a bun, as described by the man himself.
posted by TedW at 7:49 AM on September 10, 2015

Ice cream sandwich.
S'more. Oreo.
posted by kleinsteradikaleminderheit at 7:49 AM on September 10, 2015

They annoying sandwich debate I am known for is "Is a burger a sandwich?" I maintain that burgers are not simply a subset of sandwiches, but a different (though related) category. The rest of my family maintains that I am a cretin.
posted by rikschell at 7:51 AM on September 10, 2015 [2 favorites]

Mrs. gauche and I have an ongoing argument about whether cheesecake is cake.
posted by gauche at 7:57 AM on September 10, 2015

Cheesecake is only cake in the sense that a urinal cake is cake.
posted by rikschell at 8:00 AM on September 10, 2015 [2 favorites]

Cheesecake is not only cake, but the finest of all cakes. Although this whole pizza cake situation escape from the potato planet has introduced me to is making me question that position a little.
posted by threecheesetrees at 8:02 AM on September 10, 2015 [2 favorites]

Add enough gravy

Is there ever, really, enough gravy ? I have been chided by a girlfriend about simply re-heating and eating gravy directly. I then added some crackers and told her it was a soup. She was unimpressed, and we did, eventually part ways, because, goddamned it - gravy is awesome and she was not.

A sandwich on top of another sandwich makes a larger sandwich. My question though - if a hot dog is a sandwich, then what of the corn dog ?
posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 8:02 AM on September 10, 2015 [4 favorites]

informavore, you are considering bread and filling to be the same thing, which makes any layered thing a sandwich.

In my definition, implied by the invert-and-stack test, sandwiches are stackable, discrete, and defined by two outer layers of bread. Bread touching bread implies that one sandwich has ended and another began. If we simply had a picnic basket with these layers:
Bread / Peanut Butter / Bread / Bread / Peanut Butter / Bread / Bread / Peanut Butter / Bread

Then I could reach in and grab any Bread / Peanut Butter / Bread combination and get a sandwich. But if it was like this:
Bread / Peanut Butter / Bread / Peanut Butter / Bread / Peanut Butter / Bread

I can't divide that into discrete sandwiches, because the peanut butter is now adhered to the bread on either side. This is actually one gigantic peanut butter sandwich. Therefore, two layers of bread that coincide create a sandwich boundary, even though the original act may have been similar (spreading peanut butter and stacking bread).
posted by graymouser at 8:34 AM on September 10, 2015

Cheesecake is a custard. When prepared in a crust it is a custard pie. It can also be used as a filling (as in a cake with a cheesecake layer). It is never a cake unto itself. For example, it typically contains no flour and has no distinct crumb.

Bread touching bread implies that one sandwich has ended and another began.

But what of the toast sandwich then?
posted by jedicus at 8:38 AM on September 10, 2015 [2 favorites]

But what of the toast sandwich then?

All toast is bread but not all bread is toast?

But what if you make a toast sandwich on toast?

I have to sit down.
posted by murphy slaw at 8:43 AM on September 10, 2015 [1 favorite]

"Uh, I missed lunch. So, I'm going to fix myself a sandwich. Anyone want anything?

Anyone?"

-Rodney McKay.
posted by clavdivs at 8:57 AM on September 10, 2015

It's amazing Socrates can even piss in the morning without getting stuck on what is and is not "draining the snake."
posted by zippy at 8:58 AM on September 10, 2015 [2 favorites]

This is a useful way of showing how hard it is to give necessary and sufficient conditions for something's being even a commonplace object. I will use this!
posted by persona au gratin at 9:02 AM on September 10, 2015

I enjoyed that all the hypothetical example sandwiches were explicitly made with vegan ingredients.
posted by Gymnopedist at 9:06 AM on September 10, 2015

I wish I could find the original source of this, but one of my professors used to say, "at the end of the day, the skeptic leaves by the door and not the window, just like everybody else."

What's important about an exercise like the one in the article is not that it paralyze the reader in a state of epistemological crisis, but that it demonstrates that the epistemological framework does not need to be rock-solid in order to function. It encourages a degree of humility by forcing the reader or the interlocutor to acknowledge that they cannot defend the certainty with which they know what they know.

This is an ethical exercise against leaning too hard on your own confidence in what you know; it is not a practical exercise in ordering lunch. You can still go out and order a sandwich and then send it back when they give you two slices of pizza stacked face-to-face, but you must know when you do so that you are relying not on some fixed definitional meaning of "sandwich" but on a set of norms and social agreements that are not entirely within your, or anyone's, control. You're right to send back the pizza-wich, but you're only right within a social context, and not in an absolute, fixed, Cartesian sense.
posted by gauche at 9:09 AM on September 10, 2015 [22 favorites]

A sandwich is a food layered with another food for the purpose of eating it without utensils.

Tacos/burritos/wraps are sandwiches. A slice of pizza is a sandwich.

A salad is not a sandwich. A piece of lettuce between two croutons is a sandwich.

A jalapeno popper is a sandwich. Beans on toast is a sandwich.

Eggs Benedict are a sandwich frequently unsandwiched by eating them with a knife and fork. A sandwich is not just the thing itself, but how you interface with the thing.
posted by prize bull octorok at 9:28 AM on September 10, 2015 [1 favorite]

A salad is not a sandwich. A piece of lettuce between two croutons is a sandwich.

So a salad with croutons is a matrix of sandwiches, or possibly a very tall sandwich that has been folded into a bowl in a complicated way.

(Note: according to the Club Sandwich Axiom, there is no requirement that any given piece of bread constitute an endpoint to the sandwich.)
posted by gauche at 9:34 AM on September 10, 2015 [4 favorites]

From the cereal/soup thread:

"But that said I think the real answer is meese's Wittgenstein argument. Cereal isn't soup. Not for any rigid analytical reasons, but just because it's not something we would call soup. It's not the way the word "soup" is used. That might not be intellectually satisfying, but elegance and rigorous satisfaction aren't necessary conditions of successful philosophy arguments." by penduluum

I think applies here. Sure a calzone could in theory be called a sandwich but it's not the way sandwich is used. There is no ideal of a sandwich that exists.
posted by Carillon at 9:36 AM on September 10, 2015 [2 favorites]

So a salad with croutons is a matrix of sandwiches, or possibly a very tall sandwich that has been folded into a bowl in a complicated way.

Only if you eat it with your hands, gauche (a lettuce wrap is a sandwich).
posted by prize bull octorok at 9:39 AM on September 10, 2015 [3 favorites]

Only if you eat it with your hands, gauche (a lettuce wrap is a sandwich).

Except that is unsatisfactory for the purpose of determining whether you have been served a sandwich at a restaurant. You would not, I suppose, accept a server's answer "just eat it with your hands" as a satisfactory response to your pointing out that you had been served a caesar salad and not a caesar salad sandwich.
posted by gauche at 9:45 AM on September 10, 2015 [1 favorite]

You don't need the server to tell you whether it's a sandwich or not -- indeed, the server cannot tell you whether or not you have been served a sandwich. If you place the lettuce and bits of parmesan between croutons and eat them thusly, you have been served a bowl of Caesar salad sandwich fixings. Sandwiches are defined through the act of eating them as sandwiches. If you hand me an Italian sub and I place it in a bowl, tear it apart, and eat it with a fork, I am eating an ad hoc salad of sorts -- it is no longer a sandwich.
posted by prize bull octorok at 9:49 AM on September 10, 2015 [5 favorites]

This is the first time I have encountered Emersonian individualism as a position in this sort of argument, which in my experience most often breaks along continental/analytic lines. Well done, sir.
posted by gauche at 9:53 AM on September 10, 2015 [7 favorites]

A sandwich is a food layered with another food for the purpose of eating it without utensils.

So when I pick up my chana masala with roti I am eating a sandwich? That would make Indian and Ethopian deconstructed sandwich cuisines?
posted by peeedro at 9:55 AM on September 10, 2015 [2 favorites]

Yes. Eating Ethiopian food with injera bread generally involves serial acts of sandwiching.
posted by prize bull octorok at 9:57 AM on September 10, 2015 [3 favorites]

This all reminds me of my friend Tom, dog rest his soul (he was not killed after democratic vote, he passed away many years too soon).

Instead of repeatedly asking questions to irritate people, Tom was instead the master of the single polarizing question. He would approach a small group of people and ask one simple question that was fine-tuned to polarize and then sit back and watch the fireworks fly between the two groups.
posted by plinth at 10:05 AM on September 10, 2015 [1 favorite]

It's amazing Socrates can even piss in the morning without getting stuck on what is and is not "draining the snake."

The Socratic dialogues are way more fun once you realize that, rather than engaging in some profound search for truth, Socrates really just enjoyed fucking with people.
posted by Gerald Bostock at 10:05 AM on September 10, 2015 [10 favorites]

I finally realize why Socrates was forced to eat that hemlock sandwich.
posted by MtDewd at 10:12 AM on September 10, 2015 [2 favorites]

The American court system is way ahead on this - several important legal precedents are in place defining sandwiches!

http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2014/06/26/325803580/what-burritos-and-sandwiches-can-teach-us-about-innovation
posted by Mallenroh at 10:21 AM on September 10, 2015

This is radical, prize bull octorock.

So it is not so much the case that the noun "sandwich" refers to a fixed or quasi-fixed set of things or a set of things having and not having a fixed or quasi-fixed set of properties, nor even that the term "sandwich" is a valid component of a move in the language-game of ordering or otherwise talking about food, but rather that the noun sandwich refers to a way of interacting with any member of the edible-to-humans set. A "sandwich" is any edible material upon which sandwiching is performed. Do I have this right?

Because that strikes me as a definition -- or, more accurately, a conception -- of the term that is useful for avoiding critique in arguments such as this one, but not at all useful for a lot of use cases of the term. If the question of whether an item were a sandwich could not be determined in advance of its consumption, then parties could not enforceably contract to provide sandwiches, because any member or members of the edible-by-humans set can, in theory, be sandwiched upon.

So if, for instance, my catering company contracts to provide dining hall services to your college campus, and the contract specifies that we will have a sandwich bar on Tuesdays, can I satisfy that term of the contract by putting out any edible food item on Tuesday?
posted by gauche at 10:24 AM on September 10, 2015 [1 favorite]

"As I started working through the Dialogues with my students, I noticed that they tended to find Socrates frustrating, so much so that they routinely described him as “a jerk.”"

I get the same reactions from my students . A key piece of secondary reading we do on De Anima refers to Socrates as 'that shameless amateur who wrote nothing, but whom Plato recreated as a principal character in his dialogues.' I guess the students get to thinking that this is supposed to be a cuss, and that it's ok to give voice to how much the guy pisses you off when you write about him in your essay, but I think the passage is meant to be taken sincerely - he was certainly shameless and proud of his amateurism. But the 'but' in that line suggests that the author was happy to have it read like an insult at the same time as a being a correct description.
posted by Joeruckus at 10:25 AM on September 10, 2015

A "sandwich" is any edible material upon which sandwiching is performed. Do I have this right?

Yes, that is how I would have it defined.

So if, for instance, my catering company contracts to provide dining hall services to your college campus, and the contract specifies that we will have a sandwich bar on Tuesdays, can I satisfy that term of the contract by putting out any edible food item on Tuesday?

IANAL, but I would think either a) your catering company lists menu items that it calls "sandwiches" and that said menu items would be specified in the contract as comprising the sandwich bar, or b) if "sandwich bar" is left sufficiently vague, then yes, almost any selection of edibles could be legally considered to satisfy the conditions of "sandwich bar," much as an order for "appetizer trays" could be met by providing a tray of gummy worms with a shrug and an explanation that if you eat the gummy worms before dinner, they're appetizers. In this case the problem is not with the definition of "sandwich," but that a poorly-written contract has been signed. However, if you provide foods that cannot by any reasonable measure be sandwiched, you have certainly breached your contract: two bowls of broth, for example, could not possibly be sandwiched, and I think most courts would recognize that.
posted by prize bull octorok at 10:47 AM on September 10, 2015 [2 favorites]

gauche: "So if, for instance, my catering company contracts to provide dining hall services to your college campus, and the contract specifies that we will have a sandwich bar on Tuesdays, can I satisfy that term of the contract by putting out any edible food item on Tuesday?"

First of all, your contract is ludicrous on its face. Can you imagine the chaos involved in trying to get undergraduates to put a sandwich together? The mind boggles.
posted by Rock Steady at 10:51 AM on September 10, 2015 [4 favorites]

whether cheesecake is cake.
Cheesecake is pie.
posted by clorox at 10:51 AM on September 10, 2015 [5 favorites]

Stop saying sandwich!
posted by howfar at 10:57 AM on September 10, 2015

Relevant: there has been litigation over the meaning of "sandwich." And both Justice Scalia and Judge Posner have views on the matter.
posted by crLLC at 11:02 AM on September 10, 2015 [2 favorites]

whether cheesecake is cake.
Cheesecake is pie.

Pizza can be sandwich, cake and pie. And pizza.
posted by Pax at 11:04 AM on September 10, 2015 [1 favorite]

Oh wait, people on Metafilter already know about the burrito/sandwich case. Well, how about the hairy hand case? I wouldn't want to eat a sandwich--however it's defined--with one of those.
posted by crLLC at 11:05 AM on September 10, 2015

I asked the person sitting opposite me about this, and he says that three slices of bread is a sandwich, IFF the person assembled those slices of bread with the intent of making a sandwich. If the slices of bread just kind of happened that way, it is a stack of bread and not a sandwich.

He also says that a sandwich, inside two slices of buttered bread, is a sandwich sandwich.
posted by emilyw at 11:11 AM on September 10, 2015 [1 favorite]

All sandwiches exist in a 5-dimensional time-pentagram. Each corner folded in towards the flavour-Center. Multiple phases of reali-time bend forward towards the consumption.

Salad is a six-dimensional sandwich, and is beyond the scope of our non-sandwich-based cosmology.
posted by blue_beetle at 11:20 AM on September 10, 2015 [3 favorites]

I maintain that burgers are not simply a subset of sandwiches, but a different (though related) category. The rest of my family maintains that I am a cretin.

I wanted to suggest looking into Wittgenstein's concept of "family resemblance" but then thought better of it.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 11:22 AM on September 10, 2015 [1 favorite]

From the link crLLC posted:

The court ruled that the second lease was allowed based partly on a dictionary definition that defined “sandwich” as “two thin pieces of bread, usually buttered, with a thin layer (as of meat, cheese, or savory mixture) spread between them.”

A reminder that that foul prescriptivist grimoire, the dictionary, is not your friend. What is this fixation on thinness and butter??
posted by prize bull octorok at 11:27 AM on September 10, 2015 [4 favorites]

Children will be blessed for
Killing Of Educated Adults
Who Ignore 4 Simultaneous
Sandwich Same Bread Rotation.
posted by clorox at 11:30 AM on September 10, 2015 [2 favorites]

In the immortal words of Dr. Sheldon Cooper...

You can't make a half sandwich. If it's not half of a whole sandwich, it's just a small sandwich.

Vis a vis... an open sandwich is just a small sandwich.
posted by Blue_Villain at 11:36 AM on September 10, 2015

You know, in some cultures they don't have sandwiches, so when you set one down in front of them they can't differentiate it from an empty plate... Or was that a fact about a culture that had no word for the color green?
posted by Nanukthedog at 11:37 AM on September 10, 2015 [2 favorites]

Sandwichness is probabilistic. Let me taste run my Bayesian classifier over it. I'll let you know.
posted by klanawa at 12:16 PM on September 10, 2015

One definition of a sandwich consists of two pieces of bread with edible material in between them.
I posit that at any point in time, bread exists on opposite sides of the globe.
QED, the world is a sandwich.
posted by mikurski at 12:48 PM on September 10, 2015 [1 favorite]

It is too soon. I am still in fear that iridic's comment from the other day may have permanently ruined internet philosophy for me.
posted by bukvich at 12:55 PM on September 10, 2015

mikurski: "QED, the world is a sandwich."

Proven by experimentation.
posted by Rock Steady at 1:00 PM on September 10, 2015 [2 favorites]

The Socratic dialogues are way more fun once you realize that, rather than engaging in some profound search for truth, Socrates really just enjoyed fucking with people.

SOCRATES: Tell me then, Plato, would you agree that a foolsayswhat?
PLATO: ಠ_ಠ
posted by zippy at 2:06 PM on September 10, 2015 [6 favorites]

So, is chowder in a bread bowl a sandwich? What if I put the bit they cut off back on top?

I would go with something like "two edible starch products which are cooked separate from the other ingredients placed on top and below a foodstuff that can, with a certain amount of dexterity, be eaten with one hand by an able-body person while keeping some of the filling between them. Unless the weight of the starch product, the force used in applying the product compresses the center of the starch products or an exterior force pushes on the food, one can see the filling from all sides." So quesadillas made from a single tortilla and cut into thirds have the interesting quality of having one sandwich and two non-sandwiches. Most injera is not eaten in the sandwich form, as it is rolled. Wraps and burritos are not sandwiches. Pizza cannot make a sandwich, Chicago style pizza is an abomination unto god, a multi-layer cake with frosting that can be eaten by hand is one. The chowder is not a sandwich unless it is overflowing from the breadbowl and the bowl is small enough to be handled with one hand. Three pieces of bread are not a sandwich unless the middle pieces is from a different loaf. Pancakes with syrup between them are not a sandwich, but if you put fruit or ice cream there, you have one. If you can figure out how to make hand manageable lasagna, you have a weird-ass sandwich. An open faced sandwich is half a sandwich, as it is either waiting a cut down the middle so that it can be doubled or a starch product to be placed on top. The double down is a sandwich, as the starch in the breading, which is cooked separate from the bacon, forms the outer layer. A piece of fried chicken is not, as it is cooked at the same time as the frying. A deep fried oreo is not a sandwich, as the filling cannot be seen. If your hot dog bun splits, you have a sandwich, otherwise you do not. Subway sandwiches ceased to be sandwiches when the abandoned the V cut (assuming that you kept the bit that they cut out). Bagels with cream cheese are sandwiches. Crustables are a very good reason for aliens to destroy intelligent life on earth, but they do count as a sandwich, as exterior force was applied to seal them. You can make an approximation of a sandwich with lettuce instead of starch, but it is a sad mockery.

How is this so hard? Socrates was a putz, give me Epicurus any day of the week.
posted by Hactar at 2:11 PM on September 10, 2015

Apparently I cannot eat a sandwich in the dark.
posted by mikurski at 2:14 PM on September 10, 2015 [2 favorites]

Also, gazpacho is just wet salad.

Furthermore the correct spelling, as everyone knows, is "sammich."
posted by ZenMasterThis at 2:20 PM on September 10, 2015

So, is chowder in a bread bowl a sandwich?

Not if you're a strict two-slices-ist. *folds arms, glowers*
posted by graymouser at 2:30 PM on September 10, 2015 [1 favorite]

The sandwich-nature of hotdogs may be in dispute, but surely we can all agree about updogs.
posted by nicepersonality at 2:35 PM on September 10, 2015

So, is chowder in a bread bowl a sandwich?

Soup is a disqualifier of sandwich-filling, I think. You can dip a sandwich *into* a soup, but you can't dip a sandwich into a sandwich.
posted by CrystalDave at 2:37 PM on September 10, 2015 [1 favorite]

Nothing is so true it does not contain a kernel of falsehood that, when watered with words, will grow into a baobab of doubt.

And vice versa.
posted by Sebmojo at 2:54 PM on September 10, 2015

These problems crop up in artificial intelligence. If I had to guess, the brain relies heavily on the quintessential example, or the perfect sandwich, and subtracts from there. At some point it is something else, but nobody does it exactly the same.
posted by Brian B. at 3:29 PM on September 10, 2015 [1 favorite]

For the record, Dr. M. Ritchey is not a philosophy professor. She's a music professor.
posted by Dalby at 3:45 PM on September 10, 2015

So, is chowder in a bread bowl a sandwich?

No. It's cereal.
posted by triggerfinger at 4:26 PM on September 10, 2015 [2 favorites]

No matter how you slice it, the meat of this problem is that you are all a bunch of chowder heads with no filling for common sense.
posted by clvrmnky at 4:53 PM on September 10, 2015 [1 favorite]

A: if I can get away with saying "bring me that sandwich" and the person to whom I'm talking at the time brings me the thing I indicated with the noun "sandwich," the thing is a sandwich.

B: I define sandwich thusly: any edible food item consisting of bread and at least one other food item intentionally served together such that the bread may be manually handled and used as the means for delivery of both the bread and the other food item(s) to the mouth provided that the bread was baked from dough in a separate procedure from any cooking done to the other food item(s) and such that the other food item(s) are not enclosed on more than two sides by the bread.
posted by eustacescrubb at 5:12 PM on September 10, 2015

What's weird is that less than a week ago I was having basically this same conversation, while eating a peanut butter and peanut butter sandwich sandwich (which could be thought of as just a triple-decker peanut butter sandwich). And the same questions came up (is three slices of bread a sandwich? is a loaf of sliced bread a sandwich? etc etc.)
posted by aubilenon at 6:02 PM on September 10, 2015

is chowder in a bread bowl a sandwich?

It is an abomination.
posted by Mei's lost sandal at 6:58 PM on September 10, 2015

gazpacho is just wet salad

If you chop salad vegetables ever more finally, you end up with soup. If you add thickeners to soup, at some point it passes through pudding to become bread. And if you add enough elements (e.g., olives, dried tomatoes, herbs) to bread it eventually becomes salad.

Gazpacho is the heart of this mystic cycle. Gazpacho is salad, soup, cereal. All hail gazpacho.
posted by Joe in Australia at 7:07 PM on September 10, 2015 [1 favorite]

"I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["Sandwich"], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the lasagna involved in this case is not that."
posted by blue_beetle at 7:17 PM on September 10, 2015

Gazpacho is the heart of this mystic cycle. Gazpacho is salad, soup, cereal. All hail gazpacho.

Gazpacho: The sandwich triple point.
posted by mikurski at 8:37 PM on September 10, 2015 [2 favorites]

...surely we can all agree about updogs.

What's an updog?
posted by gauche at 8:50 PM on September 10, 2015

timing!
posted by gauche at 8:51 PM on September 10, 2015 [2 favorites]

Not much, what's up with you, dawg?

(You were all going to just leave gauche stranded there?!)
posted by wenestvedt at 3:27 AM on September 11, 2015

...bread and at least one other food item intentionally served together such that the bread may be manually handled and used as the means for delivery...

This would include nearly any food item served with two pieces of bread, e.g., spaghetti and two slices of garlic bread. (By this definition, it's sufficient that the spaghetti could be placed between the bread and the bread used as the means of delivery; it's not relevant that most people wouldn't eat it that way.)
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 4:24 AM on September 11, 2015

Pizza and calzones aren't sandwiches because they both require assembly first and then baking in order to be edible.
posted by Ham Snadwich at 6:12 AM on September 11, 2015

Master Shake: Who are you?... What is this?
The Voice: It is the Broodwich, forged in darkness from wheat harvested in Hell's half-acre, baked by Beelzebub, slathered with mayonnaise beaten from the evil eggs of dark chicken forced into sauce by the hands of a one-eyed madman, cheese boiled from the rancid teat of a fanged cow, layered with six-hundred and sixty-six separate meats from an animal which has maggots for blood!
Frylock: [long pause] See... told ya.
Master Shake: I tasted mustard.
The Voice: Yeah... DIJON mustard!

Master Shake: Well, how come no bacon?
The Voice: Bacon is extra.
Master Shake: You call this a sandwich, you don't have bacon on it?
The Voice: There are no swine evil enough to sacrifice upon a bed of EVIL!
[pause]
The Voice: And lettuce.
[longer pause]
The Voice: BED OF EVIL AND LETTUCE!
posted by buzzkillington at 6:36 AM on September 11, 2015 [3 favorites]

Pizza and calzones aren't sandwiches because they both require assembly first and then baking in order to be edible.

Not true on its face: A raw pepperoni pizza can be safely eaten. It wouldn't even be all that bad (but then I kind of like the flavor of raw dough).

More to the point, one can blind-bake a pizza crust and then put toppings on it. Better if it's at least toasted to melt the cheese, but one could say the same thing about a lot of sub sandwiches (although I personally prefer mine cold).

Calzones are a little trickier. One could imagine blind-baking a calzone crust with some sort of removable spacer, then stuffing it after the bake, perhaps with a piping bag.
posted by jedicus at 7:56 AM on September 11, 2015

Pizza and calzones aren't sandwiches because they both require assembly first and then baking in order to be edible.

So a grilled cheese sandwich is not a sandwich ?
posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 7:59 AM on September 11, 2015 [2 favorites]

So a grilled cheese sandwich is not a sandwich ?

It is a sandwich, and remains so after grilling, because it is stackable. A grilled cheese sandwich is not a sandwich of grilled cheese, but a cheese sandwich (valid 2-slice sandwich) that is grilled.
posted by graymouser at 8:01 AM on September 11, 2015

What do you call a sandwich that has been modified so it is no longer edible by hand? Once you pour delicious béchamel on a croque-monsieur, is it still a sandwich?
posted by peeedro at 10:37 AM on September 11, 2015

Once it obtains the state of being a sandwich, it retains that property even if it undergoes further preparatory steps that cause it to no longer be eaten in the manner of a sandwich. The sandwich-not-eaten-as-a-sandwich is a thing that retains essential characteristics of sandwichness but undergoes a process of unsandwiching as sauces are added, knives and forks are used to consume it, etc.
posted by prize bull octorok at 12:17 PM on September 11, 2015 [1 favorite]

The trap here is that you're trying to define a sandwich. There are other ways of describing something universal than defining it. For instance, it's possible to make distinctions by negation. For instance, you can say: A sandwich is not a lemur. That will always be true. And then you can simply list all of the things that a sandwich is not, and then you arrive at the universal definition of a sandwich. Or possibly a hamburger.
posted by Kattullus at 1:30 PM on September 11, 2015 [1 favorite]

A sandwich is not a lemur. That will always be true.

Once I get this ring-tailed bastard into the panini press we'll see if that's the case
posted by prize bull octorok at 1:36 PM on September 11, 2015 [16 favorites]

I have a feeling that most of the commenters in this thread are skinny. The rest of us are busy eating comestibles inspired by this thread. For my part, I made some pimiento cheese, with my not so secret ingredients of walnuts and Dijon mustard (seriously, try it for yourself; I also tend to add jalapeño and/or cayenne peppers, but my threshold for spicy runs pretty high) but was craving a BLT. So I made a BLT with pimiento cheese. It was awesome. I only wish I had better bread.
posted by TedW at 2:22 AM on September 12, 2015

I pronounce it like "gift", but without the "t".
posted by clvrmnky at 6:25 AM on September 12, 2015 [1 favorite]

I would eat a spaghetti sandwich. I'm pretty sure I have, given the kinds of restaurants that are in Lower Manhattan.
posted by eustacescrubb at 8:59 AM on September 12, 2015

Are spaghetti tacos a sandwich?
posted by TedW at 10:10 AM on September 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

I'm not sure about spaghetti tacos, but at least within my family spaghetti burritos are a generational time-honored tradition.

Step 1: Have leftover spaghetti. It can't be fresh, that ruins the whole point.
Step 2: Reheat spaghetti, soften tortilla. (Microwave, traditionally)
Step 3: Put sour cream or cream cheese in tortilla, put spaghetti on top. Eat.

(Why yes, this did come from the same college-student-mindset which also says "Tortillas make great bowl/plate coverings to save on dishes", whysoever would you ask?)
posted by CrystalDave at 10:42 AM on September 14, 2015

PLATO: ಠ_ಠ

I am totally stealing (something very similar) to that.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 4:15 AM on September 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

One of my favorite pizza places has a spaghetti and meatball pizza. It is still not a sandwich though.
posted by Ham Snadwich at 8:36 AM on September 21, 2015