Is a Hot Dog a Sandwich?

Is a hot dog a sandwich? Is a sandwich even a sandwich? The answer to both questions is: It depends. It depends on the premises in a deductive reasoning formula (rules and facts) and—as we will see below—some analogical reasoning.

It Depends

First things first: Although someone's personal opinions, judgments, beliefs, etc. are frequently based on feelings, intuition, faith, and principles, which can be mutually exclusive of particular facts or knowledge. Reasoning and argumentation, however, are necessarily dependent on facts or knowledge. To the annoyance of many (at least, in my experience), this is why the initial response that lawyers often give to general legal questions is: "It depends." What does it depend on? The answers to other questions.

So, is a hot dog a sandwich? The answer cannot be an immediate 'yes' or 'no' because of a belief or feeling. It's just not that simple. The answer—or at least a legitimate argument to support the answer—requires a reasoning process, some principles, and some facts or knowledge.

To be frank, we need to start with this question: What is a hot dog? According to Merriam-Webster, a hot dog is a "frankfurter, especially ... a frankfurter with a typically mild flavor that is heated and usually served in a long split roll." From here, it is important to observe that "hot dog" can be ambiguous (i.e., subject to more than one objectively reasonable interpretation*). As the above dictionary definition recognizes, context is important. "Hot dog" can refer to a frankfurter or a frankfurter served in a roll (e.g., a bun).

But the critical thinker will not end their questioning with only one type of reference material (e.g., a dictionary). The critical thinker will also inquire about common usage of the terms. What do people commonly mean by "hot dog"? Again, context matters. On one hand, when shopping for hot dogs at a market, shoppers do not look for frankfurters in a bun; they look for frankfurters. On the other hand, when ordering a hot dog at a restaurant, sporting event, or cookout, a person expects to receive a frankfurter in a split roll (commonly referred to as a "bun"), which is not sliced completely into two individual pieces. Considering these circumstances, regardless of someone's specific definition of a sandwich, all reasonable people would agree that a stand-alone frankfurter is not a sandwich. So, for this exercise, we will define "hot dog" as a frankfurter served in a split roll.

Of course, to determine whether a hot dog is a sandwich, we must proceed to the meat of the question. Here is how Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg reasoned through it in a 2018 interview on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert:

Colbert: Is a hot dog a sandwich?

Ginsburg: ... You tell me what a sandwich is, and I'll tell you if a hot dog is a sandwich.

Colbert: A sandwich is two pieces of bread with almost any type of filling in between, as long as it's not more bread.

Ginsburg: You said two pieces of bread. Does that include a roll that's cut open, but still not completely?

Colbert: That's the crux you've gotten immediately [sic]. That's why you're on the Supreme Court. That gets immediately to the question, "Does the roll need to be separated into two parts"? Because a sub sandwich, a sub, is not split [into two separate pieces], and yet it is a sandwich.

Ginsburg: Yes.

Colbert: So, a hot dog is a sandwich?

Ginsburg: On your definition, yes, it is.*

Once Justice Ginsburg clarified the meaning of terms, such as "sandwich" and "bread," she employed deductive reasoning to determine whether a hot dog fit within Colbert's definition. The frankfurter was the "filling" and the split roll—which did not need to be two separate pieces—was the bread. However, Justice Ginsburg's (and Colbert's) reasoning included other elements.

First, Justice Ginsburg's reasoning included an enthymeme: the implicit presumption that a hot dog was comprised of both the frankfurter and bun, not simply a frankfurter. This was a justified presumption because no reasonable person could consider a stand-alone frankfurter to be a sandwich; thus, the context of the question dictated the direction of the reasoning. Another presumption was that a "sub sandwich" is a sandwich. (And by doing this, Colbert created an exception to his rule that a sandwich has two pieces of bread. As we will see in this course, most legal rules come with exceptions.)

Second, Justice Ginsburg and Colbert employed analogical reasoning. In light of the presumption that a sub sandwich was indeed a sandwich, they made an analogy between how a sub sandwich is served and how a "hot dog" is served. (The principle being that if a sub sandwich is a sandwich, and if sub sandwiches are served on split rolls, then a hot dog should also be considered a sandwich because they are served on split rolls.)

Is a Sandwich a Sandwich?

The answer is: It depends. Before examining whether a sandwich is a sandwich, we will examine this quotation often attributed to Abraham Lincoln: "How many legs does a dog have if you call his tail a leg? Four. Claiming that a tail is a leg doesn't make it a leg." Whether being said by employers, pundits, so-called "experts," police officers, governments, etc.) saying what something "is" does not make it so.

Now, back to sandwiches. Of course, Justice Ginsburg's and Stephen Colbert's reasoning in concluding that the hot dog was a sandwich completely depended on the definition of sandwich. If this were a contract in which "sandwich" was used, even that term should be defined. If we revisit Merriam-Webster, for example, "sandwich" can include "two or more slices of bread or a split roll having a filling in between" and "one slice of bread covered with food" (i.e., an "open-faced sandwich). In this example, something can be a sandwich even if there is a single piece of bread. Certainly, this can be analogous to a split roll (i.e., one piece of bread, or at least "bread-based"), which is consistent with Ginsburg/Colbert definition.

But the analysis changes if we rely on the Cambridge Academic Content Dictionary, which defines "sandwich" as "two pieces of bread with food ... between them." This definition conflicts with—i.e., distinguishable from and not analogous to—the Ginsburg/Colbert definition. They used a definition that included, "two pieces of bread ..., as long as it's not more bread." And this dictionary represents that the American Dictionary defines "sandwich" as: "slices or pieces of meat, cheese, salads, etc., put between two pieces of bread that are held together by the person who picks them up when ready to eat." According to the definitions in this paragraph, an open-faced "sandwich" is not a sandwich, so someone could use these two authorities to argue that a conclusion that anything with a split roll (hot dog, sub sandwich) is a sandwich has a flawed premise; thus, the conclusion must be incorrect.

Furthermore, another distinction-based argument (i.e., the inverse of an analogy) against using Ginsburg's and Colbert's definition could be this: Recall that their definition included the condition, "as long as it's not more bread" (i.e., not more than two pieces). Yet, the Cambridge Academic Content Dictionary and web browser searches (and even artificial intelligence chatbots) consistently define a club sandwich as having three pieces of bread. Certainly, no reasonable person would argue that a "classic"/"traditional" club sandwich is not a sandwich.

And what about an "ice cream" or "cookie" sandwich? To paragraph, Lincoln's quotation above, you can call an ice cream sandwich a sandwich, but does that make it a sandwich? As usual, it depends.

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This page by Matthew L. Mac Kelly is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, except where otherwise noted.