The author, Dr. M. Ritchey, in the classroom.

I met Mike 15 years ago, when he moved to Portland after getting kicked out of the army due to his relentless pushing at the logic of all rules (something the army generally frowns upon). This characteristic, so foundational to Mike’s character, has been irritating his friends ever since.

One of the most infamous ways Mike’s logic-pushing tendency has manifested in recent years can be seen in his insistence on hectoring everyone he knows into fighting with him about what objective qualities can be said to constitute “a sandwich.” This conversational maneuver has effectively ruined many convivial lunchtimes and splintered several friendships, but after getting sucked into it many times against my will (once while trying to plan my wedding), I suddenly realized that the “sandwich debate” is actually not only meaningful, but its deft deployment can even teach valuable citizenship skills that, if understood by a majority of the population, would make our world a better place.

The Platonic Dialogues

I had this realization after teaching the Platonic Dialogues to a class of college freshmen. A quick explanation for the uninitiated: Plato, the great philosopher and mathematician who lived in Athens around 500 BC, was also the most prominent student of Socrates, whose ideas and style of dialogue he recorded for posterity, for example in his aptly-named “Dialogues.” The Dialogues are short works in which Plato recreates various conversations Socrates had (or might have had), including his statements at his own trial and a conversation he had with another student, Crito, on the eve of his execution, in which he invents the idea of the social contract. It is in the Dialogues that we get the detailed descriptions of the “socratic method” he apparently employed to irritate his countrymen to such a degree that they finally used the power of the State to have him killed. The socratic method is deceptively simple: it’s a dialectical method entailing the relentless questioning of your interlocutor in order to critically interrogate a point they’re making, usually with the goal of proving that there is no such thing as objective truth or whatever. “I know only that I know nothing,” is Socrates’ famous (and somewhat disingenuous) statement, and the conceptual framework upon which all his logical maneuvers depend.

Socrates was the first known “Dog Whisperer”

As I started working through the Dialogues with my students, I noticed that they tended to find Socrates frustrating, so much so that they routinely described him as “a jerk.” This made me think of Mike and his infernal sandwich debate and the ruined friendships littering its wake. I suddenly realized that even though he’d never read Plato, Mike was nonetheless engaging in a classic Socratic dialogue whenever he forced his friends to define a sandwich. Furthermore, I came to understand that he was doing it with the same goal in mind: namely, that of demonstrating how thin is the tissue of “common sense” underlying our experience and ordering of daily life. For Mike, the sandwich stands in for the dancing shadows on the wall of the cave in Plato’s famous allegory. According to Plato (and Mike), the objects (and, by extension, the ideas and values) we think we experience as demonstrable, obvious realities are merely the ghostly shadows of those realities. The real realities—Plato’s “ideal forms”—are unseeable and unknowable except to the Philosopher, a somewhat mystical figure who leaves the cave and sees reality with his own eyes. Unfortunately, the Philosopher is doomed to be hated and destroyed by his fellow cave-dwellers, who resent being told that everything they thought was real was actually an ephemeral, ungraspable dream. For Plato, this is part of why democracy doesn’t work, but that’s a whole other story.

I decided to do an exercise in my classroom that would attempt to engage my students more deeply with the socratic method and perhaps help them realize its usefulness in their own lived realities. For some reason, reading about Socrates asking Euthyphro if what is pious is pious because it is loved by the Gods or whether the Gods love that which is pious was not really making much of a dent in my students’ understanding of the world, so instead I had them try to prove that they knew what a sandwich was. I put them in pairs and instructed them to create as clear and literal a definition as they could—one that encompassed all things they knew to be sandwiches, while providing criteria for excluding all those things that were obviously not sandwiches. Furthermore, anything they were going to submit as examples of a “sandwich” also had to pass the thought experiment of imagining ordering “a sandwich” in a restaurant and being brought that thing—because after all, this is an exercise about common knowledge. We all “know” what a sandwich is. Their definition had to somehow account for this shared mental understanding. So “a bowling ball between two pieces of lettuce” would not count, for example.

I’ve done this now with five classrooms full of students, and each time the exercise progressed in the exact same way. Initially, they think it’s funny and stupid, and also easy. They set to work, bending their heads together over a shared piece of paper. After ten minutes, I ask one group to read its definition aloud, and I write it on the board. It’s usually something like: “any edible material in between two other quantities of edible material.” Then I say, “does anyone have a problem with this definition?” And from there things immediately devolve into a screaming match, just like all those interminable lunches with Mike. Many fruitful tangents are explored, such as the differing degrees of sandwichness of hot dog vs. hamburger; hand placement and orientation; “stacks” vs. “patties”; and of course the classic “what is bread” maneuver, which usually allows me to confidently say that lasagna must be a sandwich, which infuriates them.