The “are hot dogs sandwiches” debate is fun (for about five minutes). This post is meant to equip you with just enough linguistic knowledge so that, at your next function where this is a suggested ice breaker question, you can pedantically explain the nature of the disagreement.
This debate usually engages and enrages people because both of the following two things are true:
- There is no good definition of a sandwich that includes all things we call sandwiches and does not include hot dogs.
- We all know that hot dogs are obviously not sandwiches.
As a result, people engaging in this argument generally try to come up with specific requirements that a hot dog doesn’t meet, like “The two pieces of bread aren’t fully separated”, or “It has no lettuce”. These arguments aren’t particularly good, but the “anti-sandwich” crew is always very motivated to make them and usually frustrated when they break down.
The nature of the frustration arises out of a misunderstanding of language and a collision between the desire for logically coherent intensional definitions and the fuzzy extensionsal nature of most word usage.
In formal logic, an intensionally defined set is one defined by characteristics which, when all met, mean that an object is part of that class.
An extensionally defined set is only defined by an explicit list of objects.
To define “sandwich” intensionally, we’d ask a bunch of native English speakers “What is a sandwich?” and write down a clear description that captures all criteria that are sufficiently widely held.
To define “sandwich” extensionally, we’d just look at all of the things that people call sandwiches and list them.
These are somewhat related to the linguistic concepts of prescriptivism vs. descriptivism, which describe two different ways of approaching the characterization of language.
Prescriptivists (like the French Académie Française, or numerous English style guides) believe that certain uses of language are correct or good based on their adherence to some set of rules which are often grounded in the ways specific social groups, often elites, speak the larger shared language.
Descriptivists (the academic discipline of linguistics) believes that all native speakers speak correctly and “good”, and so whether a particular usage is “correct” is determined by whether it is intelligible or “sounds funny” to a native speaker.
To test whether a hot dog is a sandwich descriptively, you would ask a native speaker to pass you that sandwich while gesturing at a table that includes a hot dog and some decoy items . If they are confused, it’s not a sandwich. If they are confused but figure it out, it might be sort of a sandwich. In my own assessment as a native English speaker, a hot dog is probably mostly not a sandwich.
Prescriptivists sometimes believe that words should have precise intensional definitions, and we should attempt to adjust our use of language accordingly. A prescriptivist may believe (although I don’t know any to ask) that because a hot dog fits within the definition of a sandwich, one is obliged as a good speaker of English to refer to it accordingly.
Descriptivists are very comfortable with fuzzy extensional definitions. Descriptivists are very comfortable with the single best argument for why hot dogs aren’t sandwiches:
A hot dog is not a sandwich because it’s a hot dog.
Or, the expanded form:
My discomfort and confusion with referring to hot dogs as sandwiches as a native English speaker indicates that a hot dog is not a sandwich, and the fact that the intensional definition includes hot dogs is a sign that the usage of the word “sandwich” is not well captured with intensional definition.