Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking (10 page)

Conversely, advocates of trimming the military budget will almost invariably cite the enormous importance of other sectors of the economy and the great inefficiencies in the military. Here once again, such arguments can be spun out at great length, but however they run, they will always be centered on the bloatedness of the current military budget and the crying need for funding other sectors of the economy. This is the familiar conceptual skeleton that will guide the overall flow of the argument.

And thus we see that at the top level of the conversation, we are dealing with the very high-level categories
need for a bigger military budget
and
need for a smaller military budget
, and the activation of either category in an advocate’s mind will trigger, with a bit of variability, yet also a considerable degree of predictability, the auxiliary ideas that will pop to mind, and these will promptly enlist appropriate stock phrases and well-worn grammatical patterns, which will in their turn call up the standarized words that comprise them — and these words, in the end, will call up, with essentially no maneuvering room, the letters or sounds that make them up.

One can examine any conversation, whether it’s a deep or a shallow one, in this fashion, and one will see how analogies, at all the different levels, are in the driver’s seat. Here’s a rather light-hearted example based on a real event.

One Saturday evening, Glen and Marina Bayh had a few friends over for dinner. The food was savory, the wine and witticisms flowed copiously, and at last, around midnight, people started rising to get their coats. As they were filing out the front door, Larry Miller, one of the guests, said warmly to Glen and Marina, “It was a terrific evening. Haven’t had so much fun in a long time. Thanks a lot. Hope to see you again soon. Bye-bye!” On hearing this innocent remark, Jennifer, another guest, commented, “I always have a hard time saying good-bye to them.” Larry, puzzled, replied to her, “But all good things come to an end. We had a great time, it finished, and now we’re taking off. What’s the big deal about saying bye?” Jennifer answered, “Yeah, you’re right, but still it sounds weird, because ‘Bayh’ is their last name. I mean, for them to hear ‘Bye’ or ‘Bye-bye’ all the time must be a bit like it would be for you to hear people saying ‘Miller, Miller’ all the time, no? That would come across as strange to you, wouldn’t it?” Larry burst out laughing and said, “I guess I’m just dense! I’d never thought of that!” Right then, Larry’s wife Colleen chimed in, saying, “It reminds me of when I was a teen-ager and every time my parents took me and my brother to our grandmother’s house, he and I would always whisper to each other, ‘Now don’t forget — you have to mind your gramma around here!’ We always called her ‘Gramma’, and she was always correcting our English, so this was our private little way of getting back at her, though she never knew it.” Everyone could easily relate to Colleen’s story, and of course they all understood why her comment wasn’t a
non sequitur
coming out of left field but a perfectly apt segue.

What are the key analogies behind the scenes of this down-to-earth interchange? It was launched by an analogy between the sounds of the words “Bayh” and “bye”, which spurred Jennifer to invent an analogy between the last names “Bayh” and “Miller”, after which the surface-level topic veered off to visits paid decades earlier to the home of a relative of Colleen’s, but still driven by the momentum of analogy — this time an analogy between the name “Gramma” and the word “grammar”. At a higher level, however, the trigger that sparked the retrieval of this dormant memory in Colleen’s mind was the similarity between a fresh episode and a long-ago episode, both of which involved humorous phonetic resemblances between a normal word and someone’s name — in one case, that of “bye” to “Bayh” and in the other case, that of “grammar” to “Gramma”. So here we’re dealing with a similarity between resemblances — which is to say, with an analogy between analogies.

There is nothing unusual about this conversation or this type of analogy-spotting behind the scenes. It’s all par for the course. We exhibited it simply to show how a conversation as a whole mobilizes one or two brigades at a very high conceptual level, how those high-level concepts mobilize a few lower-level conceptual regiments, how these in turn mobilize a larger number of conceptual platoons or squadrons more or less at the level of stock phrases, and finally, how these many “smaller” concepts mobilize hundreds of individual soldiers way down at the word level.

What lies behind this universality of analogy-making? In order to survive, humans rely upon comparing what’s happening to them
now
with what happened to them in the past. They exploit the similarity of past experiences to new situations, letting it guide them at all times in this world. This incessant flow of analogies, made in broad brushstrokes, forms the crux of our thoughts, and our utterances reflect them, although our specific word choices are usually fast forgotten. The concrete meets the abstract when a down-to-earth phrase is applied to describe a down-to-earth situation but where the concepts that the phrase is built from are distant, on a literal level, from the situation. For instance, in an idiomatic utterance such as “Marie is off her rocker” or “Their love affair went down the drain”, the thought is at such a high level of abstraction that one seldom will consciously envision someone falling off a rocking chair or water flowing out of a sink or bathtub.

Much the same happens when a new situation reminds you of another situation (or family of situations) that you previously encountered and that is, on its surface, totally different, but that shares an abstract essence with the new one. Thus if one day your child is not allowed to register for a crucial event at school because the relevant Web site’s deadline was at 4 o’clock sharp and you logged onto the site at 4:01, this may summon up a long-buried memory from some fifteen years earlier of a time when you missed a plane because after dashing to the gate, you arrived just seconds after the doors had been closed, and no matter what you said, they wouldn’t let you board.

Our daily talk is filled with this kind of meeting of concrete and abstract, but we are unaware of it most of the time. Thus if a professor says, “Only a handful of students dropped in on me in my office yesterday”, we aren’t likely to envision students tumbling out of a giant hand in the sky and landing in the professor’s office. And if someone says, “There hasn’t been any snow to speak of today”, we don’t feel inclined to protest, “What do you mean? You just
spoke
of it!” The concreteness of the words and phrases that we constantly use to formulate our thoughts on all sorts of topics is at one and the same time a sign of the great concreteness of our way of thinking and also a sign of our extraordinary propensity to carry out abstraction, allowing us to cast a situation using words that would seem, on their surface, to refer to totally unrelated things.

Thus a Japanese stockbroker, commenting on the unstoppable collapse of the stock market, said, “One should never try to catch a falling knife.” Most people understand this image effortlessly, as well as its relevance to the circumstances. And yet if there is a falling knife here, it’s certainly not a knife in its most ordinary sense, and the way this “knife” is falling is invisible, comparatively slow, and not spatially localized. It took a considerable act of abstraction for that individual to use that phrase in that context — but that’s nowhere close to the end of the story, for the same phrase might just as easily be applied to a politician in the throes of a corruption scandal and whose once-ardent supporters are suddenly nowhere to be seen, or to a skyscraper on fire that it would be folly to enter, or to someone so deeply depressed that even their best friends are caught up in the atmosphere of bleak pessimism, or to someone who has fallen overboard in a
storm so violent that no one dares to go to their aid, or to an approaching hurricane that has destroyed a nearby town and from which everyone has been ordered to evacuate immediately, or perhaps, who knows, even to a person who was injured in their kitchen because they tried (of all things) to catch a falling knife. In short, we see that here we are dealing with a full-fledged category, rich and multifaceted.

As soon as one starts thinking about situations to which the phrase “One should never try to catch a falling knife” could apply, they start to pop up from under nearly every stone in sight. At least for a while, one has the impression that one could paint a large fraction of the world in terms of that phrase alone, since the world is rife with huge, irrepressible forces against which one has no power and which would carry one off to one’s doom if one were so rash as to try to stop them. Thus we will find this image jumping to our mind willy-nilly, imposing itself on us whether we like it or not, and unless we can somehow stop thinking altogether, we will simply have to let this aggressive metaphor have its way with us until it has had its fill; after all, one shouldn’t try to catch a falling knife.

In the chapters that follow, we don’t aim to speak about the brain at a biological level, but about cognition as a psychological phenomenon. We will not speculate about the cerebral or neural processes that underlie the psychological processes we describe, because our goal is not to explain cognition in terms of its biological substrate but to present an unconventional viewpoint concerning what thought itself is. Our discussion will thus take place at this rather abstract level, but even at that level there will be plenty of grist for the mill.

The book’s first three chapters constitute our attempt to provide an account of what categories and analogies are.
Chapter 1
focuses on categories associated with single words, and it also puts forth some of the key theses of the book. We show how concepts designated by a single word are constantly having their boundaries extended by analogies. We take a careful look at the development of concepts by observing the long progression that starts with the concept of a child’s
Mommy
(a specific adult human) and that gradually leads to all sorts of metaphorical uses such as
motherland
, passing en route through such concepts as
birth mother
and
surrogate mother.
We also show that less concrete words, such as “thanks”, “much”, “to fix”, “to open”, “but”, “and” (and so on) are, no less than nouns, the names of mental categories that are the outcome of a lifelong series of analogies.

In
Chapter 2
, we study concepts having lexical labels that are longer than single words. We show that hidden behind the scenes of multi-word stock phrases, even ones as long as a proverb or a fable, there lie concepts that are very similar to those designated by isolated words. Thus a phrase such as “Achilles’ heel” is the linguistic “hat” worn by a particular category (namely, the category of
serious weaknesses that may lead to someone’s undoing).
Æsop’s famous fable in which a fox tries to reach some luscious-looking grapes and when he fails, he declares that he didn’t want them anyway because
they are sour, is a linguistic embodiment of the abstract mental category of situations featuring something that is the object of someone’s ardor, but that, having turned out to be out of reach, is subsequently deprecated by the person who desired it. This abstract quality, often concisely called “sour grapes”, is potentially recognizable in thousands of situations, and this phrase could thus be used as the verbal label of any such situation, in just the same way as there are myriads of objects meriting the label “bottlecap” and myriads of actions meriting the label “retrieve”. And the same can be said of more abstract categories, some of which have to do with the act of communication taking place at the moment, and which are labeled by adverbial phrases, such as “after all”, “on the other hand”, “as a matter of fact”, “that having been said”, and so on. In other words, there are situations in our everyday interchanges that call for the label “after all”, and when such situations arise, we recognize them (almost always unconsciously) as such, and we apply that label, deftly inserting it into our real-time speech stream. The chapter concludes with a discussion of intelligence as the ability to put one’s finger on what counts in any given situation, and how the repertoire of categories that is handed to one by one’s native language and culture tailors one’s way of doing this.

Chapter 3
deals with categories for which there is no standard linguistic label; people manufacture such categories spontaneously on their own as they deal with new situations in their complex personal worlds. Later on, such categories often give rise to “reminding episodes”, where one event recalls another from another time and place, possibly very distant. As an example, when D. noticed an old friend leaning down to pick up a bottlecap in Egypt’s renowned Karnak Temple, he was suddenly and spontaneously reminded of a time, some fifteen years earlier, when his one-year-old son was sitting near the edge of the Grand Canyon and, completely oblivious to the spectacular scenery, was intently focused on some ants and leaves on the ground. Despite all the superficial differences that can be found separating any two situations from each other, when such a reminding incident takes place, it reveals that the two situations in question share a conceptual skeleton at a deeper level, and it shows how extremely rich and subtle is our storehouse of non-lexicalized concepts. By analyzing a series of sentences containing such high-frequency phrases as “me too”, “next time”, and “like that”, we show that lurking behind any such phrase, no matter how casual and simple it may seem, there is a non-verbalized category, sometimes simple and sometimes subtle, based on an implicit perception of sameness, which is to say, based on an analogy.

Chapter 4
deals with the way in which, in our interactions with the world around us, we constantly and fluently move about in our repertoire of categories, and yet nearly always without the least awareness of doing so. The chapter focuses particularly on inter-category leaps that involve shifts between levels of abstraction. The flexibility of human cognition relies profoundly on our ability to move up or down the ladder of abstraction, for the simple reason that sometimes it is crucial to make fine distinctions but other times it is crucial to ignore differences and to blur things together in order to find commonalities. For instance, while one is dining, one will take care to distinguish between one’s own glass and that of one’s neighbor, but afterwards, when one is placing
them in the dishwasher, that distinction will be irrelevant. As another example, parents will try to assure that their children get involved in “activities”, whether this means acting in plays, doing judo, or playing a musical instrument.
Activity for my child
is a highly abstract category. The most humble of our acts conceals choices of abstraction that are hard for us to recognize accurately, because such acts are central to cognition. We have a very hard time “seeing” our cognitive activity because it is the medium in which we swim. The attempt to put our finger on what counts in any given situation leads us at times to making connections between situations that are enormously different on their surface and at other times to distinguishing between situations that on first glance seem nearly identical. Our constant jockeying back and forth among our categories runs the gamut from the most routine behaviors to the most creative ones.