#burgerquest

See also what makes a salmon burger (ground and shaped into round patty) vs. salmon sandwich (whole fillet, may or may not be breaded).

If you have a slab of steak between buns, it's not a steak burger, despite still using beef.

You're saying these things like they're facts that answer my whole burger-sandwich question. But they're not facts - they're your personal understanding of each of those terms. My understanding of each of these terms is very different:

A "chicken burger" definitely includes most burgers at KFC, including chicken tender burgers, chicken fillet burgers, etc

If I saw "salmon burger" on a menu I would assume it would be a battered or crumbed salmon fillet on a burger, like most seafood burgers where I'm from in Australia.

If you asked me to picture a "steak burger" I would picture sliced strips of steak on a burger bun.

(if you were intending to help by offering your personal perspective as a data point, it would have helped if you included the region/variety of english you speak)

This is why the question is so difficult. People's understanding of the term "burger" (or "sandwich" for that matter) results in different interpretations and since there is no single trait that ties these interpretations together, there can be no hardline "definition" for the word "burger". This is true for every (natural) word in every language (technical terms excepted since their definitions inform the use of the word, not the other way around - e.g. scientific term "bug" vs everyday use "bug").

A few years ago at work, two friends and I started a sandwich club, called Club Sandwich. I work in tech, so our office came with certain perks. One of those perks was that we got supermarket deliveries to the office every week to stock the pantry and fridges with staples, so people could make snacks for themselves during work. The point of Club Sandwich was to hijack the delivery order, so that we could get good sandwich ingredients and make toasted sandwiches over lunch (and save on eating out).

Club Sandwich quickly grew. Within a month, my friends and I (operating as the Toastmasters of the Supreme Sandwich Council), decided to begin holding special make-your-own sandwich lunches for the whole office. People began posting pictures of their sandwiches from home in the work group. Club Sandwich was open to everyone, and it was a good time to be a sandwich lover. Unfortunately, being open to everyone means that you’re open to conflicting ideologies…

In July of 2019, a simple and reasonably innocuous question was asked by a regular attendee of our lunches - “Can we post burgers in this group?”

Now, I like a burger as much as the next guy. In fact, they’re probably my favourite food besides sandwiches. But, as sandwich enthusiasts, we three Toastmasters instinctively knew that burgers were out of the question for Club Sandwich, and made a rule that burgers were not allowed. However, that question caused people to begin questioning what it meant to be a sandwich, and a few particularly contrarian software developers began stirring up some shit and asking even more ridiculous questions, like “can we post hot dogs?” or “can we post tacos?”. The resulting chaos threw the society into turmoil. The worst part? They were right.

Every dictionary definition I could find defined a sandwich like this:

Filling in between two pieces of bread or a split roll; OR filling on top of a single piece of bread, as in an open-faced sandwich; OR something resembling a sandwich

Operating under that definition, almost any food that involves bread is a sandwich! Under this definition, burgers, hot dogs, avocado on toast, even DIP can be a sandwich. Not to mention the “anything resembling a sandwich” part! How can it be that all of these things are sandwiches, and yet no one thinks of them as sandwiches?

A few days later, I made the following post in the group:

Where does a burger end and a sandwich begin? The differentiation comes with the meal's conception. If the meal is intended as a burger, then it is a burger. If it was made as a sandwich, then it is a sandwich. Labels exist for us to conveniently associate with concepts; without them our world would grid to a halt. It's these labels which we use to create mental models of a meal and our expectations of that meal. Labels cause differences in perception and, by extension, reality. Naming something a burger comes with other conceptual baggage that a sandwich does not. Bread, patty, lettuce, cheese; these are all nought in the face of a name. A sandwich is a sandwich is a sandwich. Further discussion is encouraged, but variations on the argument "It's just fillings in bread, what's the difference?" will be met with swift and savage ridicule. Thank you.

This seemed to stabilise the discourse, for the time being. Of course, the discourse never completely stopped, but I was glad to have a resolution to the problem.

Yet… I didn’t feel satisfied with my argument. The intent of a meal alone isn’t enough to give it a concrete label - I can’t say “I’m going to make a burger” and then make chilli con carne and assert that it’s a burger just because I called it that from the beginning. It seemed like a good starting point, but it didn’t sit right with me.

I was given the opportunity to refine my argument some months later, when a friend from outside of work invited me to a “powerpoint party”. Everyone needed to come up with a presentation and deliver it in front of everyone else, while getting smashed on punch. I, of course, made my presentation about the difference between a burger and a sandwich. I evolved my argument into three points:

Technically a burger is a sandwich, but it’s not useful to use the word sandwich to refer to it.

It is not useful because ”sandwich” is a higher level category than “burger” and if you refer to something using a category that’s too high level, you don’t get your meaning across. For example, if a child showed you a picture of a firefighter and asked what it was, you wouldn’t say “this is a mammal”.

You don’t get your meaning across because a burger is “too strong of an idea” to be a sandwich.

To be honest, I didn’t word it as simply as this, because I still didn’t quite understand what my point was. I didn’t like how wishy-washy the phrase “too strong of an idea” sounded. I felt better about my argument, but I still wasn’t completely satisfied.

As the years went on, I never stopped thinking about this question:

“Why should burgers not be allowed in Club Sandwich?”

Which turned into a more difficult question over time:

“Why are burgers not considered sandwiches in day to day life, even though they technically are sandwiches?”

In my quest for burger understanding, as I read through Semiotics for Beginners, I’ll pull out any interesting or thought-provoking quotes, then write down my thoughts.

Chapter 2 Part 7

Here is a homely example of levels of verbal abstraction in relation to a cow called 'Bessie':

1. The cow known to science ultimately consists of atoms, electrons etc. according to present-day scientific inference... 2. The cow we perceive is not the word but the object of experience, that which our nervous system abstracts (selects)... 3. The word 'Bessie' (cow) is the name we give to the object of perception of level 2. The name is not the object; it merely stands for the object and omits reference to many characteristics of the object. 4. The word 'cow' stands for the characteristics we have abstracted as common to cow, cow, cow... cow. Characteristics peculiar to particular cows are left out. 5. When Bessie is referred to as 'livestock' only those characteristics she has in common with pigs, chickens, goats, etc. are referred to. 6. When Bessie is included among 'farm assets' reference is made only to what she has in common with all other saleable items on the farm. 7. When Bessie is referred to as an 'asset' still more of her characteristics are left out. 8. The word 'wealth' is an extremely high level of abstraction, omitting almost all reference to the characteristics of Bessie. (McKim 1972, 128; the origins of this example are in Korzybski, via Hayakawa 1941, 121ff)

Holy shit. This is extremely helpful to my sandwich research. I suppose the main message of what is being said here is that certain words operate on different levels of abstraction of the physical object - “abstraction” in this case meaning how many characteristics of the object are being referred to or having attention called to them. The smaller the number of characteristics, the higher the level of abstraction.

Also worth mentioning is that the more “general” a term is (i.e. the more physical objects that it could reasonably refer to), the higher the level of abstraction it operates on (due to the number of characteristics shared between all possible objects being smaller). It’s like a Venn diagram. The more circles involved, the smaller the overlapping portion in the centre. (However, this raises another question, how do you determine whether a term refers to a particular word in the first place - this is the question when asking if a hot dog is a sandwich) 

Another thing I’d like to note is that in the above “levels” of abstraction, it feels like a nested abstraction. The word “cow” groups and refers to characteristics shared by the individual objects themselves, but the word “livestock” groups and refers to characteristics shared by more specific words that fall under its umbrella, and does not refer to characteristics shared by the individual objects themselves.

If I made a burger and called it “Florbimo”, when I use the word “Florbimo” I am referring to all of its characteristics. When I use the word “burger” to refer to Florbimo, I am calling attention to the characteristics that it shares with other objects that people refer to as “burgers”. When I use the word “sandwich” to refer to Florbimo, I am calling attention to the characteristics that it shares with all other objects that people refer to as “sandwiches”.

In my quest for burger understanding, as I read through Semiotics for Beginners, I’ll pull out any interesting or thought-provoking quotes, then write down my thoughts.

Chapter 2 Part 5

Peirce himself frequently mentions 'the sign' when, strictly speaking, he is referring to the representamen. It is easy to be found guilty of such a slippage, perhaps because we are so used to 'looking beyond' the form which the sign happens to take. However, to reiterate: the signifier or representamen is the form in which the sign appears (such as the spoken or written form of a word) whereas the sign is the whole meaningful ensemble.

This is a good reminder of a confusing concept.

For Peirce, a symbol is 'a sign which refers to the object that it denotes by virtue of a law, usually an association of general ideas, which operates to cause the symbol to be interpreted as referring to that object’

What the fuck… I understand what’s being said after a few read-throughs but wow, this is the most difficultly worded sentence so far.

As Kent Grayson puts it, 'When we speak of an icon, an index or a symbol, we are not referring to objective qualities of the sign itself, but to a viewer's experience of the sign’

In my quest for burger understanding, as I read through Semiotics for Beginners, I’ll pull out any interesting or thought-provoking quotes, then write down my thoughts.

Chapter 2 Part 4

There is considerable disagreement about the details of the triadic analysis even among those who accept that all three components, A, B and C, must be taken into account. Should A be defined as a physical or a mental entity? What is the psychological or ontological status of B? Is C something that is referred to on a particular occasion? Or is it the totality of things that might be referred to by uttering the sign...? Or, yet a third possibility, is it some typical or ideal representative of this class?

I am currently in the depths of a very dense and complex section. This quote seems to summarise my confusion on two levels. The first is that the above quote is referring to the multitude of interpretations the semiotic triangle model can have (which I assume is why I find it so confusing - I can’t anchor it to a real example because it’s expressed in such vague terms). The second level is that this quote is itself dense and confusing, and serves as a good exemplar of the content of this section. Though I understand the general point it’s making about multiple interpretations and the model being too abstract, there are many details that my mind zones out while reading over. “Psychological or ontological status of B” - What?!

Unlike Saussure's abstract signified (which is analogous to term B rather than to C) the referent is an 'object'.

In my quest for burger understanding, as I read through Semiotics for Beginners, I’ll pull out any interesting or thought-provoking quotes, then write down my thoughts.

Chapter 2 Part 3

As an example of the distinction between signification and value, Saussure notes that 'The French word mouton may have the same meaning as the English word sheep; but it does not have the same value. There are various reasons for this, but in particular the fact that the English word for the meat of this animal, as prepared and served for a meal, is not sheep but mutton. The difference in value between sheep and mouton hinges on the fact that in English there is also another word mutton for the meat, whereas mouton in French covers both'

I don’t think I agree that they have the same meaning if one refers to meat and animal, and the other refers to just animal. How can it be said that sheep and mouton have the same meaning if we look at these adjoined subdivisions of thought and speech (which Saussure used himself)?

Is Saussure saying that the “value” of a sign is based on how many disparate concepts it can refer to?

In my quest for burger understanding, as I read through Semiotics for Beginners, I’ll pull out any interesting or thought-provoking quotes, then write down my thoughts.

Chapter 2 Part 2

Within such a framework the signifier is seen as the form of the sign and the signified as the content. However, the metaphor of form as a 'container' is problematic, tending to support the equation of content with meaning, implying that meaning can be 'extracted' without an active process of interpretation and that form is not in itself meaningful

The idea that a “sign” has no inherent meaning without a process of interpretation is something that seems to makes sense, but is somehow hard for me to wrap my brain around. It’s the “if a tree falls in the forest” meme, but in this case the tree actually does not make a sound without someone there to hear it. I suppose in order to understand this concept better, I need to relate it to something practical that I already understand!

One example could be a word written in a language that no one understands. However, the fact that something is written down has meaning in and of itself (the fact that someone, at some point wanted to convey some information), and depending on where it’s written, the font, the material it’s written with, more meaning can be attributed to it without actually understanding the word. This is all part of an “active process of interpretation”. The act of reading and actually understanding the written word would, again, just be another part of that active process of interpretation.

As I was writing the above, I realised that prescriptivists of language might assert the opposite - that the sign has meaning without interpretation. The reason they might argue this, is that a prescriptivist believes that there is a “wrong” and a “right” way to use language, outlined by a set of rules (contrasted by a descriptivist who believes the only “wrong” way to use language is in a way that cannot be understood by the listener). A prescriptivist might suggest that a word has a set, unchanging meaning. In doing so they are also intrinsically suggesting that no matter who reads (interprets) it, it has that set meaning. This means that they are suggesting that meaning is not created from the interpretation of a sign, but contained, unchanging, within the sign.