In 1964, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart gave one of the most elegant, if imprecise, definitions of pornography that I’ve ever encountered. He said
I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.
Indeed. You know it when you see it. What could this mean?
Perhaps Potter Stewart was making oblique reference to the existence of an implicit cultural norm, that none present could readily communicate, but all shared because of their membership in a common culture. It’s reasonable to expect that different cultures might have very different category boundaries for all kinds of things, and pornography is no exception.
Maybe that’s not what he meant though. He didn’t say “we all approximately agree”. He said “I know it when I see it”. That is very much a first-person imperative statement. Justice Potter knows what pornography is, and the way he knows it is by automatic visual recognition. Now that’s an interesting epistemic claim. The condition of this knowledge is an unconscious algorithm that produces a binary output: porn or not porn, and it accomplishes this near instantaneously.
Two people might disagree on what counts as pornography and this might lead to some awkwardness, legally speaking, but we have institutions that decide whose opinion is supreme in disputes of this kind. A Justice of the Supreme Court is the one whose opinion counts. Justice Potter’s opinion was used instrumentally to decide a legal dispute. It was not intended to be definitional. He opined that the film in dispute in Jacobellis vs. Ohio could not be censored because it wasn’t hardcore enough, and therefore does not count as “obscenity” and first amendment protections allow Jacobellis (or anyone else) to exhibit the film as they please.
The film in question, by the way, is Les Amants, which probably has a sex scene in it or something like that. I’d love to see the film, to be honest. 1964 was a long time ago though, and I suspect by the standards of 2021 it will seem utterly tame. Cultural standards shift over time and with them shifts the category boundaries that make up the body of our object-level opinions and subjective evaluations.
But what has this got to do with sandwiches?
I love to eat sandwiches. I love to make sandwiches too. I don’t think I need to convince you of the virtue of this world-famous food category. But there are so many types of sandwiches! It’s a rich vein of epistemic problems to mine. It’s also an amazing opportunity to try and chip away at the great mountain of vibe that is aesthetics because we will be getting into some object level opinions about sandwiches today.
Because we are stupid people who live in a stupid world, there is a rich existing discourse on the topic of sandwich category theory. Perhaps you’ve seen the alignment chart?
This is a matrix on two axes and three set points, for a total of nine categories. Where would you place yourself on this chart? Personally I go for structural purity but I’m an ingredient rebel. Perfectly happy to call an ice cream sandwich a sandwich. A burrito is definitely not a sandwich though. It’s a fundamentally different shape and is constructed differently. For example, a pure structure sandwich has layers. The ingredients are stacked in strata, and one of the opportunities to exercise aesthetic judgment is in the selection of the ingredients and the order they’re stacked in. One could argue a burrito is a translation from rectilinear to polar geometry and should still count. I respect the argument, though I disagree.
What if you’re more into continuous distributions than discrete categories? Good news!
We’re dealing with the same axes here but the category boundaries blur together more. This is satisfying for the nuance junkies among you.
But what if you’re a true degenerate and in your world absolutely everything is political? This is no obstacle to the sandwich discourse. Behold!
No, I don’t know what it means either, but in typical uncanny fashion I find myself greatly enjoying the entries in the bottom-left quadrant and disliking most of the stuff in the top-right quadrant, so this chart must be accurate. I’m an incurable weeb though so I’m probably just gonna plant my flag in Tonkatsu Sando centrism and call it a day.
And if that doesn’t satisfy you, then let’s raise the temperature a bit and see if introducing higher dimensionality is what your soul craves.
for what it’s worth, I think this chart gets it right on the hotdog question (and even if a hotdog was really food, it would be a type of taco not a sandwich).
What have we learned today? I think we’ve learned that sandwiches share the characteristic of pornography in that despite most people having a clear subjective sense of what they are (“I know it when I see it”) there is not widespread agreement on those subjective standards. The eye of the beholder is a highly variable point of view.
Stay hungry,
Dan
1 people love lists of things
2 this is my ethno-religious identity
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sandwiches
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pastrami_on_rye