Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking (12 page)

And so the primordial concept
Mommy
and the slightly more sophisticated concept
mommy
act in very similar ways. In particular, both of them are easily mapped onto newly encountered situations “out there”, which leads both of them to extending themselves outwards — a snowball effect that will continue all throughout life. It’s this idea of concepts extending themselves forever through a long series of spontaneous analogies that we wish to spell out more carefully in the next few sections.

One day, Tim, who sadly has never met his father, is playing in the park, and he runs into a little girl accompanied by a grown-up who is encouraging the girl to play with the other children. He thinks to himself that this grown-up is the
mommy
of the little girl. That is, Tim’s mind makes a link between what he’s observing and his new concept of
mommy.
This is an act of categorization. Perhaps the new person is not actually the child’s mother but the child’s father, or perhaps it’s her grandmother, or even her older brother or sister, but even so, that doesn’t make Tim’s mapping of this new person onto the category
mommy
irrational, because his notion of
Mommy/mommy
is wider than ours is (not richer, of course, but less discriminating, due to his lack of experience). This simple analogy Tim has made is flawless; it’s just that he hasn’t taken into account certain details that an adult would have used. If Sue, his mother, explains to him that this person isn’t the little girl’s
mommy
but her
daddy
, then Tim may well modify his concept of
mommy
, thereby coming into closer alignment with the people around him.

Gradually, as Tim uses the word “mommy” more and more, his initial image — that of his own mother — will start to recede from view, like a root being grown over ever more as time passes. He will overlay his earliest image with traits of other people whom he assigns to this mental category, and the vivid and unique features of his own Mommy will become harder and harder to find in it. Nonetheless, even when Tim is himself a grown-up, there will remain in his concept of
mommy
some residual traces of his primordial concept
Mommy
.

One day, a friendly woman who’s come all the way from her home in Canada turns up and treats Tim very sweetly. He hears the word “mommy” used several times to refer to this grown-up, and so for a while he concludes that maybe he has more than one mommy. For Tim this is conceivable, since he has not yet built up a set of expectations that would rule this possibility out. Sometimes his “second mommy” takes him to the park and she, too, chats with the other mommies. But after a week or so, Tim’s second mommy vanishes, which quite understandably saddens him. The next day, one of the mommies in the park asks Tim, “Did your grandmother go back home?” Tim doesn’t answer, because he doesn’t yet know the concept of
grandmother.
So she reformulates her question: “Where’s your mommy’s mom today, Tim?” But this question makes even less sense to Tim. He knows perfectly well that
he’s
the one who has the mommy (he even had two of them in the past few days!), and so his mommy (that is, the remaining one) can’t have a mommy. After all, it’s
children
who have mommies (and sometimes also daddies) whose purpose is to be sweet to them, to watch over them, and to help them, and Tim knows that his mommy
isn’t
a child, and so she doesn’t have a mommy. That’s obvious! The woman doesn’t push her strange question, and Tim goes back to his playing.

And time passes. A few months later, Tim starts to realize that grown-ups are sometimes accompanied by other grown-ups that they refer to as their “mother”. Suddenly everything starts to be clear… What children have are
mommies
, and what grown-ups have are
mothers.
That makes sense! And into the bargain, there’s even an analogical bond between
mommy
and
mother.
Of course Tim isn’t aware of having made an analogy — neither this concept nor the word for it will be known to him for another ten or more years! — but he has nonetheless made one. And as is often the case with analogies, this one helps clarify things for Tim but it also misleads him a little.

We now will skip over the details, simply adding that the two concepts of
mommy
and
mother
gradually merge to create a more complex concept at whose core there is the primordial concept of
Mommy.
This doesn’t mean that the primordial image of Sue springs to Tim’s mind every time that he hears the word “mother” or even the word “mommy”, but merely that the invisible roots are structured in that manner.

As any concept grows in generality, it also becomes more discriminating, which means that at some point it’s perfectly possible that some early members of the category might be demoted from membership while new members are being welcomed on board. Thus the dad at the park whom Tim had first taken for a
mommy
is stripped of the label, and although Tim’s grandmother stays on as a member of the category
mother
, she winds up in a less central zone than the
mommy
zone, which is reserved for the
mothers of small children. And of course as time goes by, Tim will come to understand that his grandmother herself was once a member of the category
mommy
(just as his own Mommy was once a member of the category
small child
), but at present all of that is well beyond his grasp.

One might think that the concept of
mother
is very precise — perhaps as precise as that of
prime number.
That would imply that to every question of the form “Is X a mother or not?”, there would always be a correct, objective, black-and-white answer. But let’s consider this for a moment. If a little girl is playing with two dolls, one bigger and one smaller, and she says that the big one is the small one’s mother, is this an example of motherhood? Does the large doll belong to the category
mother
? Or contrariwise, could one state without risk of contradiction that she does
not
belong to that category?

And if we read a certain book in which a certain Sue is described as the mother of a certain Tim, then does this Sue, who is never anything but a made-up character in a book, truly belong to the category
mother
? Does it make any difference that Sue was modeled on a real person, and Tim on her son? Is Sue more of a mother than the doll is? What indeed is Sue? If in the book it states that she is 34 years old, that she has light brown hair, that she weighs 120 pounds, that she is five feet five inches tall, and that she’s the mom of a small boy, does that mean that Sue has a body and once gave birth? A doll, at least, is a physical object, but what is Sue, when you come down to it? An abstract thought triggered by some words on a page, by some black marks on a white background. Does this thought even deserve the pronoun “she”?

When Tim gets to be six, if someone tells him that Lassie is Spot’s mother, he certainly won’t protest, but if he were told that the queen bee is the mother of all the bees in her hive, it’s less clear what he would say, and in any case some mental effort would be needed before he could absorb this idea. And if he were told that a drop of water that he just watched dividing into two drops is the mother of the two new drops, he would almost surely find this suggestion very surprising. Everyone knows phrases that use the word “mother” in ways that go far beyond the senses that apply to Lassie, the queen bee, or even the splitting drop of water — for instance, “my motherland”, “a mother cell”, “the mother lode”, “Mother Earth”, “Greece is the mother of democracy”, and “Necessity is the mother of invention”. Are these true instances of the concept of
mother
, genuine cases of maternity? What is the proper way to understand such usages of the word?

Some readers may feel inclined to say that these are all “metaphorical mothers”, and indeed, such a viewpoint is not without merit, but we have to point out that there is no sharp boundary that separates “true” mothers from those that are metaphorical, for categories in general don’t have sharp boundaries; most of the time, metaphorical and literal meanings overlap so greatly that when one tries to draw a clear boundary, one discovers that things only get blurrier and blurrier.

When he turns seven or eight, Tim will start to be able to handle phrases in which the word “mother” is used with greater fluidity than back in nursery school. He might run into the statement “Mary is the mother of the Lord Jesus” in a religious context. This is a mild extension of the usual meaning, since Mary is imagined as a woman whereas the Lord Jesus is imagined as a divine being, magical and omnipotent in some ways, even if also, in some sense, as a baby like all others. At age seven, though, Tim probably won’t have much trouble envisioning Mary giving birth to the Lord Jesus.

On the other hand, having given physical birth to a baby is not a prerequisite for attributing motherhood to an entity, since even if no one ever teaches us this explicitly, we all come to know that motherhood pulls together several different properties, such as that of
female biological parent
, that of
female nurturer
, and that of
female protector
, and these properties do not all need to be present simultaneously. For example, the familiar fact of adoption reminds us that giving birth is only one possible route for becoming a mother.

If at age nine, Tim is reading a book on Egypt or on mythology and runs into the sentence “Isis is the mother of Nature”, he’ll have to extend his prior conceptions of motherhood at least slightly, because this time, Isis is not a human being but a deity who, in Tim’s mind, looks much like a woman but in some sense is not one, and who is capable of giving birth to some rather abstract things, such as Nature, yet without anything emerging from her body. And yet Tim will rather easily absorb this new instance of motherhood, because she looks enough like hundreds of other members of the category
mother
that are already installed in his memory.

Moving right along, Tim will soon handle cases that are even more abstract, such as “Marie Curie is the mother of radioactivity”, “The American revolution is the mother of the French revolution”, “The American revolution is the mother of the Daughters of the American Revolution”, “Judaism is the mother of Christianity”, “Alchemy is the mother of chemistry”, “Censorship is the mother of metaphor” (Jorge Luis Borges), “Leisure is the mother of philosophy” (Thomas Hobbes), and “Death is the mother of beauty” (a quote from Wallace Stevens, and also the title of a detailed study of the role of metaphor in thought by cognitive scientist Mark Turner).

And we can go yet further, to the idea of Nature as the mother of all living creatures (“Mother Nature”), or the idea of
Mother Superior
in a convent, or the idea of
den mother
for a Cub Scout pack, or the idea of a company that has a
mother company
from which it sprang at some earlier point, or the idea of the
mother board
in a computer, and so forth. A mother in a park, a mother in a soap opera, an adoptive mother, a den mother, a mother doll, a mother bee, a mother cell, a mother board, a mother drop of water, a mother deity, a mother company, the mother lode… Given that some mothers, such as Tim’s mommy Sue, are certainly “real mothers”, while others, like the mother board, are just as certainly “metaphorical mothers”, the goal of drawing a sharp, objective boundary between the two distinct subcategories seems as if it might well be within reach. However, as we have shown with our list of blurry examples, such as the person in a novel, the doll mother, and the adoptive mother, that hope is but a beckoning mirage.

The story we’ve just told illustrates a central theme of our book — namely, that each category (in this book we use this term synonymously with the term “concept”) is the outcome of a long series of spontaneous analogies, and that the categorization of the elements in a situation takes place exclusively through analogies, however trivial they might seem to an adult. A crucial part of this thesis is that analogies created between a freshly perceived stimulus (such as the mother of a little girl in the park, as seen by Tim) and a relatively new and sparse mental category that has only one single member (such as Tim’s category
Mommy)
are no different from analogies created between a perceived stimulus (once again, take the same woman in the park) and a highly developed mental category to which thousands of analogies have already contributed (think of the very rich category
mother
in the mind of an adult).

This last statement is among the most important in our book, yet on first sight it might seem dubious. Is it really plausible that the very same mechanisms underlie the act whereby a two-year-old spots a Saint Bernard and exclaims “Sheep!” and the act whereby a physicist of great genius discovers a subtle and revelatory mapping between two highly abstract situations? Perhaps it seems implausible at first glance, but we hope to have made it convincing by the end of the book.

In the meantime, to facilitate building a pathway that will get us to this goal, we’ll set up some intermediary bridges. Toward this end, it will be useful for us to take a look at a number of statements made by children, for these statements reveal hidden analogies that underlie their word choices. And so, without further ado, here is a small sampler of children’s sentences, many of which were collected by developmental psychologist Karine Duvignau in her work with parents who were observing their children at home.