One can, however, defend a vagueness-theory answer in which some things are clearly burgers, and some things are clearly not burgers, but there are going to be median cases where -- while there may be a fact of the matter about whether or not they are -- we lose clarity on the question. "Is a hot dog a sandwich?" is a good example of another debate people have in which the answer seems vague rather than clear.
This approach may finally be similar to AVI's in effect, where we ultimately lose any final answer on what is or isn't a burger or a sandwich; but there are facts of the matter about what different people take to be such things at different times and places.
However, the history of hamburgers is fun to read about. Sources are too unclear to be sure that we have the archetypal hamburger at any point before the 1920s, when early major chains like White Castle went into operation. However, there are viable claims all the way back to the 1740s.
White Castle actually claims their sandwich originated at the hands of one Otto Krause in 1891, with a fried egg -- still very popular in Australia -- and was popularized by German sailors. I think that sounds entirely plausible: that period knew a great many German sailors, who could easily have spread the style to America and Australia as well. However, German instability had existed since the Thirty Years War, and there had been many earlier waves -- including in the 1700s, making the earlier claims quite possible too.
Of course we would run into that 'but was it really a hamburger qua ground beef mince, or some other kind of sausage that was known in Hamburg and just called a 'Hamburg sausage' in 1747? No one knows.
The late 19th century through all these Worlds Fairs and similar fairs that are mentioned in the article was also the great period for the American popularization of chili -- and also wide variants of exactly what chili might be, from the chili con carne of the Southwest, to Texas Red, to New Mexican Green and Red, to even the Midwest's Cincinnati chilli (not a typo). These days you get chili with and without beans, with and without meat, and with nontraditional meats.
All quite fascinating stuff, and why I am up after midnight for no good reason.
11 comments:
There are also regional variations of what qualifies, and regions of course get snippy about things for no good reason. At that point, agreeing with a pronunciation, or a preparation, or a classification is mostly a matter of "Are you from around here or from away?" The pronunciation of Appalachia and pecan vary in the ranges where people can legitimately claim them, yet getting them "wrong" in a particular area brands you as an outsider, which so-called natives (whose longevity in an area is sometimes limited) use to exclude you. There was shock among the rich visitors to Nantucket who took pride in recognising the subtle local accent when linguistic research showed that the accent had only come back among those who stayed through the winter when the others came in. It had pretty much vanished before that.
We are determined to include and exclude. Sandwiches are no worse a battleground than a dozen other things, I suppose.
Beef patty or two? Bread to contain it? Condiments on it? It's a burger at my place.
Full disclosure: I love the WhatABurger patty-melt. It is one of my favorite burgers. YMMV.
LittleRed1
AVI: What actually interests me is the metaphysical question rather than the historical one. The historical one is fun and interesting. The metaphysical question is of titanic importance. If the way you have been talking about things is right, nothing is really anything. There are conventions about what we call things, but those are social artifacts in constant change. There is no hamburger, somewhat like 'there is no spoon.'
Well, but there must be at least some limits to that. After all, there must be the things that we are -- we who give names to other 'things' that aren't really those things. We obviously exist, and seem to have some distinction and permanence. Yet then all those other questions you and others are asking take on a new light. You were just objecting to being addressed as "Men" as if it were a source of dignity. Others are asking if there are any such things as 'men' or 'women' at all. Maybe that category is also just a social artifact, even though we mean by it one of the only two (two? ten? six hundred?) kinds of beings that really have existence and aren't just named this-or-that by accident.
It's a silly question, what is a hamburger: everybody knows, or thinks they know. Any child could pick one out of a picture book. Yet it turns out to be as hard a question as 'what is a woman?', which until the day before yesterday everyone thought they knew how to answer.
If the answer isn't that one, which seems to destabilize so much, then we need a better grounding for questions like 'what is a man?' or, maybe, 'what is a hamburger?' Maybe there is sufficient grounding for organisms in their biology, but not for songs or kinds of food. Maybe; but that is already in dispute.
That's the question that really interests me.
By the way, James or one of our other mathematically inclined will sooner-or-later be along to point out that I'm invoking set theory backwards. I know that. I was constructing that opening argument for fun, not to take seriously.
In fact the question of whether set X is a subset of set Y is determined by whether or not every member of X is also a member of Y. You can't do that sleight of hand of assuming that it is; you have to determine whether each and every member of X is also a member of Y. Asserting that this will be the case because it is a subset is in fact asserting (and assuming) exactly what has to be proven.
It may be worse than that. Because language is merely a set of shared agreements what we call something is indeed arbitrary. I may say Der Hund, you may call his brother beside him dog. Yet they are both the same sort of thing, in the same category whether we have identical words or indeed any words for them or not. The category is grounded more deeply in reality than the words. Yet this concept does not exist without our uttering it in imperfect language. So the category exists, and theories about categories exist, yet aren't the latter not quite as real as the former. Even without becoming mere conventions, aren't they just a bit softer around the edges?
I would sense that the answer is yes, but absent any supporting evidence, maybe not.
Maybe another angle to look at it is if we identify x as a unique thing (or subset) within a set (or superset) y, can it become disassociated with that set or superset? If so, what's the criteria for breaking the association? At least some people claiming to have originated the hamburger do so based on serving up something that was much closer to a 'Hamburger (meat) Sandwich' including putting the ground beef patty on toasted bread slices, and even used that name if I recall correctly. Sounds a lot like a cheese-less patty melt. Over time the bread became a dedicated bun or roll, and the condiments and toppings evolved, and now somebody would look at you kinda funny if you asked for a 'Hamburger sandwich with cheese on toast' even if that's an accurate description of what you'd be served after ordering a patty melt. If you ask for a roast beef sandwich and I give you thinly sliced beef on a French roll and the whole thing dipped in the meat juices, are you justified in complaining that you didn't order a French Dip? It almost sounds redundant to say "French Dip Sandwich" even though they almost always appear under that heading in a menu.
The hot dog question is interesting from the aspect that if x shares characteristics with members that we put in set y, can it remain independent of the set? If you order a hot dog and I hand you a sausage on a plate, is that what you asked for? The lore of hot dog history says that's how it started, with the bun added for convenient eating on the go, even if the combination was never popularly a 'hot dog sandwich' that I know of.
"So the category exists, and theories about categories exist, yet aren't the latter not quite as real as the former. Even without becoming mere conventions, aren't they just a bit softer around the edges?"
Yes, perhaps. And notice you're talking about the best case: organisms. Artifacts like hamburgers may not have categories that are real at all. They aren't any thing, where 'thing' denotes an object a that is an example of a category H. You can eat a, but there is no H.
That derails much of 20th century metaphysics, but also most of all metaphysical thinking of all time. We're back to Nominalism, first cousin to Nihilism.
That's an undesirable outcome, though -- as I was saying about Neoplatonism the other day -- it still might be true. Only one of those two ideas could be true, but either of them could be in a way that other theories can't.
"The hot dog question is interesting from the aspect that if x shares characteristics with members that we put in set y, can it remain independent of the set?"
There's a very good question about whether you can apply set theory to physical reality in a meaningful way. It may well be that the idea of sets is illusory in just the way we're talking about categories like 'hamburger' as being illusory. For set theory to work in an application like this, the sets would have to be in some way real. Well, maybe they're real as ideas; but then there's no fact of the matter about which discrete objects are in which set. We may well disagree about that (as people are doing here regarding patty melts).
The Universe has a collection of things (shoes and ships and sealing wax and cabbages and kings). We can partition these into sub-collections, overlapping or not as we please.
These subsets exist in some sense that I don't want to try to analyze right now. I just want to get this "kind of existence" out of the way first.
Typically we don't create collections by enumeration, but by some rule. You could say that the rule also exists in some sense, but we don't always (often) define our rules very precisely.
For example, is the Venus de Milo a woman? Strictly speaking, of course not, it's a statue. But if we're trying to sort out artworks, you might call it one anyway. Since we don't speak Entish we simplify our rules so they work most of the time--we hope.
For the question about hamburgers, we leave out details like what the nature of the bread is--dense, soft, size, etc. We aren't as picky as McD's has to be in defining it. My definition of a sandwich results in something you'd recognize--within a particular domain of assumptions (how about steak tartar between potato chips?).
If I want to talk about whether "hamburger" exists as a category, I have to take that domain of assumptions into account.
We have obvious problems trying to include un-mentioned assumptions. But since we typically want to do something our rule--with the hamburger (e.g. serve it to our guests), we want a well-specified example.
This is rather the opposite of what one tries to do in mathematics, which is to abstract--and often one gets fruitful questions by making your original question more general. But I didn't marry some abstract "women", I married a specific one.
The Universe has a collection of things (shoes and ships and sealing wax and cabbages and kings).
Well, maybe it has those things. That's really the issue, isn't it? All those things are made up of atoms, but atoms don't touch; they come into relationships of some sort. We have the sense that we have touched many things, but since we and those things are made of atoms that don't touch, that is an illusion. And the atoms aren't real either; they themselves prove to be relationships of smaller or more basic things. And those 'things,' if they are things at all and not another layer of relationships, seem to pop in and out of existence to a certain degree. Electrons do, even: we picture them as orbiting the nucleus, but that isn't quite right. An electron can be here or else there, and never moving between those two options.
So we have a set of 'things' that might not really exist in any formal way. And now we find that the things we call hamburgers... well, none of them are 'really' a hamburger because that category is constantly shifting and somewhat a matter of debate between conventions. So we can't really say for sure that the hamburger is a hamburger. We can't even say that it is really a 'thing,' not in the metaphysical sense.
We can partition these into sub-collections, overlapping or not as we please.
If we can do that, then my original joke-proof holds. It just only holds for me, and anyone who happens to agree with me. Yet it only holds because I say it does, and they do. There's nothing to it beyond our assertions.
These subsets exist in some sense that I don't want to try to analyze right now.
This is actually the big problem for applying set theory to reality. Does the subset exist? How can it, if the things that are supposed to be members of the set can't be said to exist in any kind of final and certain way? Then the sets and subsets themselves cannot be a source of real information either. If that's right, you can't really say if a subset exists because you can't give a final answer as to whether any of the members of the set is or isn't a member of the subset.
Typically we don't create collections by enumeration, but by some rule. You could say that the rule also exists in some sense, but we don't always (often) define our rules very precisely.
Right. This has its own problems. If we define 'ravens' by a rule including the following condition ('All ravens are black'), then any mutation that is white is by definition not a raven. If we define ravens by their DNA, then the mutation is in an important sense already a different species than its mother and father.
After this you move into 'universe of discourse' discussion, in which we try to apply a set of such rules to a set of objects. This is well-traveled field in 20th century metaphysics; there's a whole symbolic language for describing it. I've been using it a bit here. A variable is (x,y,z), and it is an individual whose identity is unknown but could be anything. A constant is (a,b,c) and an individual whose identity is firmly known and set. A universal is a capital letter (e.g. A, H, R, D), which denotes a category of things.
So is this patty melt (a) a hamburger (H)? Well, we can apply rules such as 'all hamburgers are made of ground beef' [(∀x)Hx->Bx)]
But if you look back through the discussion, we have now reason to doubt both the existence of the H, the B, and even the a. All we have left is the x... and ourselves, trying to make sense of all this.
At the macroscopic level you can have an extremely high degree of confidence that your hamburger will stay on your plate and not tunnel through the table to the floor. (Unless your termite problem is really really bad.) You bet your life that your motorcycle will behave classically.
If you're trying to count the number of "charm quarks", yes, that gets kind of weird; it's probably better to think of a particle as field with a mix of things. Electrons may not be the easiest things to pin down, but the relationships between collections of particles can be very stable when looked at in bulk.
I think the relevant fuzziness in existence is more a matter of the things changing. One minute I have chunks of beef. After a few crank turns I have ground beef. If I let it sit a month I have a pile of mold. In between... If I have a sliced bun and a burger patty and I assemble them using a cup of ketchup, I have a mush-burger--the bun is now more of a bread soup.
I haven't looked at the symbolic language here: I assume there's some way to specify different rule-based universals with the same root: H vs H∪{ extra assumptions/rules }
This whole thread is exactly why AI will always be deeply limited.
Post a Comment