Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking (3 page)

We expresss deeepest gratitude to David Bender, Steven Willliams, and Jane Stewart Adams for scouring
this
book for typos and non sequiturs, and
mutatis mutandis
, we thank Christellle Bosc-Miné and Karine Duvignau for scouring
that
book. And no, certainly not to be forgotten are Greg Huber, Tom Seeber, and D. Alvin Oyzeau, all of whom tinkered most helpfully with the figures (and sometimes with the facts as well!).

It goes without saying that many of Doug’s friends have become friends of Emmanuel’s, and vice versa, which of course blurs the borders of all these categories. Such mingling of two worlds has been one of the great side benefits of so many years of work together. Indeed, sometimes the process seemed so long it would never end, and yet here we are, putting the finishing touches on this book. We have learned a great deal about thinking, about writing, and about language from this process, and we hope our readers will take pleasure in, and hopefully inspiration from, our joint creation.

In this book about thinking, analogies and concepts will play the starring role, for without concepts there can be no thought, and without analogies there can be no concepts. This is the thesis that we will develop and support throughout the book.

What we mean by this thesis is that each concept in our mind owes its existence to a long succession of analogies made unconsciously over many years, initially giving birth to the concept and continuing to enrich it over the course of our lifetime. Furthermore, at every moment of our lives, our concepts are selectively triggered by analogies that our brain makes without letup, in an effort to make sense of the new and unknown in terms of the old and known. The main goal of this book, then, is simply to give analogy its due — which is to say, to show how the human ability to make analogies lies at the root of all our concepts, and how concepts are selectively evoked by analogies. In a word, we wish to show that analogy is the fuel and fire of thinking.

Before we can tackle this challenge, we need to paint a clear picture of the nature of concepts. It is easy — in fact, almost universal — to underestimate the subtlety and complexity of concepts, all the more so because the tendency to think of concepts in overly simple terms is reinforced by dictionaries, which claim to lay out the various different meanings of a given word by dividing the main entry into a number of subentries.

Take, for example, the noun “band”. In any reasonably-sized dictionary, there will be, in the overall entry for this word, a subentry describing a band as a piece of cloth that can be wrapped around things, another subentry describing how a band can be a colored strip or stripe on a piece of cloth or other type of surface, another subentry
describing a band as a smallish set of musicians who tend to play certain types of music or to use only certain types of instruments, another one for a group of people who work or play together, another one for a wedding ring, another one for a selection on a record or a compact disk, another one for a range of frequencies or energies or prices or ages (etc.), and perhaps a few others. The dictionary will clearly set out these various concepts, all fairly distinct from each other and all covered by the same word “band”, and then it will stop, as if each of these narrow meanings had been made perfectly clear and were cleanly separable from all the others. All well and good, except that this gives the impression that each of these various narrower meanings of the word is, on its own, homogeneous and not in the least problematic, and as if there were no possible risk of confusion of any one of them with any of the others. But that’s nowhere near the truth, because sub-meanings are often closely related (for instance, the colored stripe and the range of frequencies, or the wedding ring and the piece of cloth wrapped around something), and because each of these supposedly clear and separate senses of the word “band” constitutes on its own a bottomless chasm of complexity. Although dictionaries give the impression of analyzing words all the way down to their very atoms, all they do in fact is graze their surfaces.

One could spend many years compiling a huge anthology of photographs of highly diverse wedding bands, or, for that matter, an anthology of photos of headbands, or of jazz bands, or of bands of criminals — or then again, of photos of wildly different chairs or shoes or dogs or teapots or versions of the letter “A”, and on and on — without ever coming close, in any such anthology, to exhausting the limitless possibilities implicitly inherent in the concept. Indeed, there are books of precisely this sort, such as
1000 Chairs.
If the concept
chair
were completely straightforward, it is hard to see what interest such a book could possibly have. To appreciate the beauty, the originality, the practicality, or the style of a particular chair requires a great deal of experience and expertise, of which dictionaries cannot convey even an iota.

One could of course make similar observations concerning the subtleties of various types of bands — thus, one could spend one’s whole life studying jazz bands, or headbands, or criminal bands, and so forth. And even concepts that seem much simpler than these are actually endless swamps of complexity. Take the concept of the capital letter “A”, for instance. One would need many pages of text in complex, quasilegal language if one were trying to pin down just what it is that we recognize in common among the countless thousands of shapes that we effortlessly perceive as members of that category — something that goes way beyond the simple notion that most people have of the concept “A” — namely, that it consists of two oppositely leaning diagonal strokes connected by a horizontal crossbar.

Indeed, catalogues of typefaces are veritable gold mines for anyone interested in the richness of categories. In the facing figure, we have collected a sampler of capital “A” ’s designed for use in advertising, and as is clear from a moment’s observation, any
a priori
notion that one might have dreamt up of
A
-ness will be contradicted by one or more of these letters, and yet each of them is perfectly recognizable — if not effortlessly so when displayed all by itself, then certainly in the context of a word or sentence.

The everyday concepts band,
chair, teapot, mess
, and letter
‘A’
are very different from specialized notions such as
prime number
or
DNA.
The latter also have unimaginably many members, but what is shared by all their members is expressible precisely and unambiguously. By contrast, in the mental structure underpinning a word like “band”, “chair”, “mess”, or “teapot” there lurks a boundless, blurry richness that is completely passed over by dictionaries, because spelling out such subtleties is not a dictionary’s aim. And the fact is that ordinary words don’t have just two or three but an
unlimited number
of meanings, which is quite a scary thought; however, the more positive side of this thought is that each concept has a limitless potential for variety. This is a rather pleasing thought, at least for people who are curious and who are stimulated by novelty.

There is a linguistic notion called “zeugma” (also sometimes called “syllepsis”) that, although it is fairly obscure, has a good deal of charm and brings out the hidden richness of words (and thus of concepts). The zeugma or syllepsis is one of the classical
figures of speech, and is often — perhaps nearly always — used to humorous effect. It is characterized by the fact that more than one meaning of a word is exploited in a sentence, although the word itself appears only once. For example:

I’ll meet you in five minutes and the garden.

This sentence exploits two different meanings of the preposition “in” — one temporal and the other spatial. When one imagines meeting someone
in
a garden, one sees in one’s mind’s eye two relatively small entities physically surrounded by a larger entity, whereas when one imagines a meeting taking place
in
five minutes, one thinks of the period of time that separates two specific moments from each other. Everyone understands with no trouble that these are two very different concepts associated with the same word, and the fact that the preposition “in” is used only once in the sentence despite the wide gap between the two meanings that it’s conveying is what makes us smile when we read the sentence.

Here are a few other somewhat humorous examples of zeugmas:

Kurt was and spoke German.
The bartender gave me a wink and a drink.
She restored my painting and my faith in humanity.
I look forward to seeing you with Patrick and much joy.

In the first, the word “German” is forced to switch rapidly, in the reader’s mind, from being an adjective denoting a nationality to being a noun denoting a language.

The second zeugma involves two different aspects of the notion of
transfer
between human beings. Does one person really
give
a wink to another person? Is a wink a material object like a drink, which one person can hand another?

In the third zeugma, the speaker’s faith in humanity had disappeared and was made to come back, whereas the painting had not disappeared at all. Moreover, faith in humanity is far less palpable than a painting on one’s wall. What gives this zeugma its flavor of oddness is that one of the meanings of the verb “restore” that it depends on is “to return something that has been lost”, while the other meaning used is “to make something regain its former, more ideal state”, and although these two senses of the same word are clearly related, they are just as clearly not synonymous.

Finally, the last zeugma in our quartet plays on two sharply contrasting senses of the preposition “with”, one conjuring up the image of someone (Patrick) physically accompanying someone else (the speaker and the person being addressed), and the other communicating the emotional flavor (great pleasure) of a mental process (the anticipation of a reunion). As in the other cases, the zeugmatic use of “with” brings out the wide gap between two senses of one word, and to experience this distinction in such a crisp fashion is thought-provoking. We thus see that any well-designed zeugma will, by its very nature, automatically highlight certain semantic subtleties of the word (or phrase) around which it is built.

For example, what does the word “book” mean? One would at first tend to say that it designates an object made of printed sheets of paper bound together in some fashion, and having a cover (and so forth and so on). This is often correct, but the following zeugma brings out a different sense of the word:

The book was clothbound but unfortunately out of print.