Is water wet? Is a hot dog a sandwich?
I was at my friend’s house for Christmas and I was chatting with him and his family after dinner. I was asked my opinion on the question, “are the moon and planets considered part of nature?”
I think asking questions like these can be fun, but ultimately you are playing semantic games. If I pose the question, “is a hot dog a sandwich?”, this evokes a weird feeling because you don’t normally think of a hot dog as a sandwich. Then in your argument, you might try to work out how to actually define the category of sandwich. The problem with this is that words mean different things to different people.
I propose a better way to answer such questions, which is to ask questions about the question itself: Why are we asking if a hot dog is a sandwich? Why have we invented the category of “sandwich”? Questions of this nature are great because they generalize beyond the specifics of the question and allow us to answer questions of a similar nature. They also tell us something meaningful about language.
Before we venture further on, I will use the term “category question” to refer to any question of the form “does [X] thing satisfy [Y] category?” (I could not find a name for such a thing online).
Descriptive Language
The people that write dictionaries tend to categorize them into one of two main categories: descriptive and prescriptive. Descriptive approaches to lexicography “[do] not dictate how words should be used or set forth rules of ‘correctness’” [source]. Basically, descriptive approaches put people first and set out to describe how people actually use language. Contrast this with a prescriptive approach, which puts words first, attempting to define rules for how words should be used by people.
In general, I like to lean towards the descriptive approach, because it aligns more with my view that language is an ever-evolving phenomenon. New words are always emerging into existence (“rizz”, “visiting triple penjamin city”, etc.), and old words are always being phased out.
The definition of words should be descriptive, but they are not arbitrary. For example, we might say that we have two genders, man and woman, derived from biological sex. This is a meaningful categorization because men and women clearly look and behave differently in society and we should have words to describe people that fall under each category (refer to my other piece, What is a Man?). Maybe we would also like to open up those categories of men and women to include transgender people, to be more inclusive and to reflect our changing values in society in the language that we use (I am not advocating for doing this or not doing this). If we are using descriptive language this means we would change the definition of man and woman. But notice, this is not an arbitrary change we are making. There should be a good reason for changing the definition of words, and the definitions of words should accurately reflect how people use the words.
Now that we are armed with an understanding of what descriptive language is, we can now begin to ask the important questions about categories and category questions.
Non-answers to Category Questions
The biggest red flag to look out for when trying to answer category questions is an appeal to authority. When you Google “is a hot dog a sandwich?”, you will get plenty of results from sources saying that Merriam-Webster dictionary says that hot dogs satisfy the definition of sandwich, because “the definition of sandwich is ‘two or more slices of bread or a split roll having a filling in between’”. The people that provide these kinds of answers to these questions are saying that Merriam-Webster is the definitive authority on the meaning of words, and since M-W says that the definition of [Y] is [Z], it must be the case that since [X] satisfies the definition [Z], [X] must fall under category [Y]. However, this exactly contradicts what M-W sets out to do, which is to define language descriptively! If you see my reference for the definition of descriptivism, you will see that M-W is a descriptive dictionary. By appealing to M-W as an authority on definitions of categories, you are completely missing out on why and how people use words a certain way.
Is a Hot Dog a Sandwich?
This is a particularly interesting case because it contains an instance of what is called semantic overload. My computer science friends will understand this to mean that a word or symbol has more than one meaning, and the meaning that is meant is determined by context (scope).
The word “sandwich” can refer to both a format and a specific type of food. For example, if I ask you to “go to the kitchen and make me a sandwich”, you probably envision something like some lettuce, tomato, cheese, and sliced meat sandwiched between two square pieces of bread. When people use the word “sandwich”, this is what they are referring to most of the time.
But a sandwich can also refer to a format. For example, soup is also a format. What I mean by “format” is that basically any ingredient can be reasonably used in a soup. The “format” of a sandwich is broader than what a sandwich is normally understood to be. The “format” of a sandwich is basically the Merriam-Webster definition of a sandwich: “two or more slices of bread or a split roll having a filling in between”. Although the Popeyes Louisiana Chicken Sandwich looks more like what we normally refer to as a burger, it is also still a sandwich (since the category of “burger” is a subset of the category of “sandwich”, according to our “format” definition). This is proof that people can use “sandwich” to mean a format.
So this is interesting: when you are in the context of a kitchen and you ask your friend to make you a sandwich, the sandwich you think of in your head looks different than what sandwich refers to in the context of being in a Popeyes restaurant.
This resolves why it feels intuitively uncomfortable to call a hot dog a sandwich, because when we think of the word sandwich, we normally think of the “kitchen” sandwich, which looks very different than a hot dog. But by understanding that “sandwich” also has this other “format” definition, it suddenly makes more sense why a hot dog could be considered a sandwich.
Arguing that a sandwich should have bread that looks like [X], or should have two pieces of bread, or should have [Y] ingredient, would be missing the point (this would be more of a prescriptivist, not a descriptivist argument).
Is Water Wet?
Instead of just arguing over the definition of “wet”, let’s talk about why we have the adjective “wet”. When we think of “wet”, we think of things that are wet. These might be things that are saturated with water (for example, a damp cloth) or things that have water on its surface (for example, wet pavement is wet but the water does not penetrate the surface).
So, can we say that water is wet? My response to this question is, it’s not a very good question since it doesn’t matter. It might matter to a trans person whether they are considered a certain gender, because that affects their acceptance in society. Never in the history of the world has it mattered to someone whether water is wet or not. Telling someone that a cloth is wet tells that person something about the cloth. But telling someone that water is wet doesn’t change anything about how we view the water, so it’s a useless piece of information.
The correct answer to the question “is water wet?” is another question in the form of “why does it matter if water is wet?”, and the answer to that question is, “asking if water is wet or not is a silly question and it does not matter one way or another”. Maybe the reason it seems like a fun question to think about is precisely how silly it is.
In Conclusion
I have proposed a framework for answering category questions. When responding to such questions, you should keep in mind: 1) prescriptive vs. descriptive language, and 2) ask questions about the question itself. Hopefully you find this information useful.
