(It is about ten and three years since I've been to one, respectively, but I doubt that much has changed!)
In my usage, you can eat just a hamburger, but McDonalds won't sell you one; they'll insist on putting it between slices of bread, thus making a hamburger sandwich of it. If you want to eat just the hamburger, you'll have to peel off the bread and throw it away. They also sell fried-fish sandwiches and, in an absurd attempt to seem "healthy", chicken sandwiches.
Around here Starbucks serves mostly desserts, but that might be a regional thing.
Wait until you start asking "is a hotdog a sandwich?". (Seriously, Google it.)
Clearly there's an entire missing dimension to the graphic, because it totally denies the existence of the Hamburger Irredentist Youth League to which OJFord belongs!
But I think temperature is a better indicator than ingredients: 'a sandwich' is not cooked (it's ingredients might be, like meat obviously, but then cooled) or hot.
Of course you can have a 'toasted sandwich', but the qualifier's important, it's basically a different thing that happens to share a word - if you ordered a 'cheese sandwich' and it came out toasted you'd be surprised.
Which makes a hotdog trivially not a sandwich, but you could slice up some sausages the next day and have them between slices of buttered bread for a 'sausage sandwich' (which likewise is not a term anyone would use for a hotdog!)
I'm curious if these "foods" exist in the UK, and if so, what they're called!
That's why you'll hear the term chicken sandwiches (because they don't contain patties), but you'll never hear burgers ever being called "beef" sandwiches. (Beef sandwiches exist -- like roast beef sandwiches, beef-on-weck, Italian beef, pastrami sandwiches, etc. -- these contain forms of beef that are not burger patties). Beef burgers and beef sandwiches are different things.
Similarly, chicken sandwiches ≠ chicken burgers. They're different things. The latter always has a (chicken) patty. The former almost always doesn't.
McDonald's and most other fast-food places are actually pretty consistent with their burger vs sandwich terminology and don't really mix them up.
https://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en-us/full-menu/burgers.html
https://www.chick-fil-a.com/menu
Source: paid my dues and eaten too many burgers and sandwiches to gain this useless knowledge.
Such ontologically incoherent definitions are obstacles to clear reasoning (though less seriously than eargrayish definitions like defining "murder" to mean either one person killing another or stepping on the shadow of the King). Is there a reason your proposed definition of "sandwich" is not among them?
Burger is a subclass of sandwich, but it's a distinct subclass that has a different name, and the superclass name is excluded.
(...please God don't let him ask me about hotdogs...)
A curry is "just" a soup with spices. But if you walked into a restaurant and ordered "soup of the day" and got a vindaloo, you might feel deceived. If the waiter assured you that a vindaloo is ontologically a soup, I doubt that would be much consolation.
Sometimes in language, if you use a general term (A), when a more specific term exists (B subset A), then using that general term A carries the meaning A\B, because if you had meant B you would have said B instead.
My concern with ontological coherence is perhaps better explained by Goodman's "new riddle of induction": https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology-bayesian/#Ob...
> In the past all observed emeralds have been green. Do those observations provide any more support for the generalization that all emeralds are green than they do for the generalization that all emeralds are grue (green if observed before now; blue if observed later); or do they provide any more support for the prediction that the next emerald observed will be green than for the prediction that the next emerald observed will be grue (i.e., blue)? Almost everyone agrees that it would be irrational to have prior probabilities that were indifferent between green and grue, and thus made predictions of greenness no more probable than predictions of grueness. But there is no generally agreed upon explanation of this constraint.
(This is somewhat mineralogically naive, because emeralds are just green beryls; a beryl that was blue would be called an "aquamarine" or "maxixe," not an "emerald," because greenness is part of the mineralogical definition of "emerald." But it's straightforward to change the riddle to refer to, for example, grass. The grass has always been grue; should we expect it to still be grue tomorrow?)