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Re:Too many species have been lumped together into Homo sapiens by wumpus on Sunday December 05, 2021 @09:43PM (#29455596)
The aspect ratio rule fails for a bagel-with-cream-cheese from a NY food cart, clearly a sandwich, which has a square of cream cheese which is as large as the bagel in 2 of 3 dimensions.

I don't really get how your prescriptive rule means open faced sandwiches somehow "contain" their contents. Then again, since I don't believe in being prescriptive, I don't really care to think hard enough about the contortions of logic required by your approach.

Re:Too many species have been lumped together into Homo sapiens by jjk166 on Monday December 06, 2021 @09:12AM (#29459910)
But it has 1 dimension, it's thickness, which is substantially smaller. You don't have a cube of cream cheese, you have a thin square. Thus it satisfies the aspect ratio rule, which, again, says there is one substantially smaller dimension than the other two.

A container is something which contains. If you can manipulate something by the bread part and the contents stay put, they are contained. While the aspect ratio rule may be legitimately controversial, if you don't restrict your definition of sandwich at least to stuff contained by bread then what isn't a sandwich?

The whole point of this exercise is to taxonomically categorize foods as being sandwiches or not sandwiches, how would you do that without being prescriptive?

Re:Too many species have been lumped together into Homo sapiens by wumpus on Monday December 06, 2021 @11:55AM (#29462225)
The usual non-prescriptive example is Platonic ideals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platonic_idealism