Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking (35 page)

A central thesis of this book is that analogy-making defines each instant of thought, and is in fact the driving force behind all thought. Each mental category we have is the outcome of a long series of analogies that build bridges between entities (objects, actions, situations) distant from each other in both time and space. These analogies imbue the category with a halo lending it a suppleness that is crucial for the survival and well-being of the living being to whom it belongs. Making analogies allows us to think and act in situations never before encountered, furnishes us with vast harvests of new categories, enriches those categories while ceaselessly extending them over the course of our lives, guides our understanding of future situations by registering, at appropriate levels of abstraction, what happened to us just now, and enables us to make unpredictable and powerful mental leaps.

And yet, for all this, the word “analogy” is seldom heard in ordinary speech. Its rarity conveys the impression that analogies are unusual delicacies, like caviar or asparagus tips, or precious gems, like rubies or emeralds. The word “analogy” tends to come to mind only when we see someone explicitly link two entities that at first glance strike us as deeply unlike each other, and hearing the word makes us anticipate a feeling of surprise, delight, or revelation, such as when someone suggests a mental link between two entities as remote and unrelated-seeming as, say, asparagus tips and analogies.

If a politician were to compare Saddam Hussein to Adolf Hitler, everyone would call this act an analogy (not necessarily an excellent one), especially if a number of connections were explicitly pointed out, such as the way the two leaders seized power, the way they governed, or their invasions of bordering countries. The category
analogy
would light up in an instant if a physicist were to suggest that the molecules in a gas are constantly bashing into each other like a myriad of billiard balls banging against each other on an enormous pool table, or if a biologist were to describe the way that two
strands of DNA can come apart and then rejoin each other as being like a zipper on a jacket. And if a journalist described a fan who hovered around a movie star as a satellite in orbit around a planet, labeling this an “analogy” would seem very natural.

All the above are fine analogies, but they reinforce the prejudice that analogies must always be spicy, picturesque, and unexpected, like those in the sampler below:

z… a
d… w
a… z+1
abc… xyz
abd… wyz
wing… fin
song… drug
to die… to part
sexism… racism
division… sharing
God… Santa Claus
to be born… to arrive
an animal heart… a pump
the atom… the Solar system
giving birth… running a marathon
creating a work of art… giving birth
leukemia… ivy creeping all over a house
an upside-down wineglass… the Eiffel Tower
global warming… the warming in a greenhouse
a moon orbiting a planet… a planet orbiting a star
a suicide bomber… a wasp that perishes when it stings
an animal circulatory system… a national highway system
immune system protecting a body… army protecting a country
a concept growing inside a brain… a metropolis spreading in a valley
an insect hovering around a streetlight… a moon in orbit around a planet
a chain reaction… dogs barking making other dogs in the neighborhood bark
the next-to-last letter of the roman alphabet… the second letter of the roman alphabet
humans surrounded by analogies they don’t notice… fish surrounded by water they don’t feel

Each of these one-liners is at least a bit provocative, thus matching the stereotype of analogies, but in truth, most analogies are unprovocative, yet are analogies no less.

The last line of our sampler puts it clearly. Like fish swimming in a medium of which they are unaware but that allows them to dart nimbly from one spot to another in the vast briny depths, we human beings float, without being aware of it, in a sea of
tiny, medium-sized, and large analogies, running the gamut from dull to dazzling. And as is the case for fish, it’s only thanks to this omnipresent, unfelt medium that we can dart nimbly from one spot to another in the vast ocean of ideas.

In this chapter, we will concentrate on analogies that, unlike the stereotype, lack spice and do not grab attention, but are different from those dealt with in the preceding chapters. In those chapters, we showed how simple words and common expressions — lexical items — are constantly jumping to our consciousness thanks to “little” analogies that are found unconsciously and ultra-rapidly. These “analogettes” constitute the most basic and crucial acts of categorization in our lives. Their
raison d’être
is to allow us to relate instantly and easily to the most standard situations that we face, and also to allow us to talk with others about them. However, the analogies that spring up at every moment in our heads are not limited to those that slap linguistic labels on things.

When we go beyond the activation of categories having pre-existent verbal labels, we enter the realm of
non-lexicalized categories.
By this we don’t mean that it is impossible to describe such categories using words — in general, this can be done perfectly well, and that’s a blessing, since otherwise we would be unable to discuss such categories in this chapter! All we mean is that there is no previously existing label, whether it be a single word or a phrase, that bubbles up from memory. There is a lexical gap, in short, like the vividly painted verbal vacuum in Tony Hoagland’s poem. Now if people had to rely on a special
alternative
set of cognitive mechanisms every time they ran up against a lexical gap, then the centrality of categorization’s role in cognition would be cast in grave doubt. However, the existence of non-lexicalized categories reinforces our thesis that categorization through analogy-making is the universal fabric of cognition.

We rely constantly on concepts that have no name. Words and concepts are two different things; indeed, linguists classically distinguish between a linguistic label and the thing to which the label refers. This distinction overlaps the distinction made by psychologists between the
mental lexicon
(our storehouse of labels) and
semantic memory
(our storehouse of concepts). If one were to fail to make this distinction, then there would be no meaning to a phrase such as “the meaning of a word”. The distinction between a label and a category is crucial, and hopefully is clear. Although many situations trigger concepts designated by standard words or phrases, we also face many situations for which we have no ready verbal label. However, this doesn’t mean that such situations are less categorizable than ones for which a standard word or phrase exists.

Every day, without reflection, we construct a fair number of fresh new concepts, most of which we wind up never thinking about again because they are applicable only in a specific, one-of-a-kind context. The psychologist Lawrence Barsalou launched the study of such categories, which arise when one suddenly finds oneself driven to attain some unfamiliar new goal. He gave them the name of “ad-hoc” categories (meaning “spontaneous” or “improvised”) because they are created on the fly in the service of the new goal. For instance, the category
possible Christmas presents for one’s twelve-year-old
is an
ad-hoc category that might count among its members such items as a backpack, a compact disk, a pair of running shoes, a video game, a trip to an amusement park, a dinner in a favorite restaurant, a flight in a balloon, and so forth, despite the fact that, without knowledge of this special connection among them, the items in this list might seem to have nothing in common.

If one keeps one’s eyes peeled, one can discover collections uniting some rather bizarre bedfellows on signs that list prohibited activities and entities in public places. For example, in Palmer Square in Princeton, New Jersey, a sign declares, “No skateboarding, rollerblading, bicycle stunts, horseplay, littering”; in a park in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, one is warned: “No bike riding, pigeon feeding, dogs”; and on a beach near Bloomington, Indiana, “No glass, pets, or alcohol”.

It’s possible to enumerate all sorts of ad-hoc categories, such as those in the following hopefully provocative list (which includes a number of cases suggested by Lawrence Barsalou himself):

(We might add that the list itself is an excellent example of an ad-hoc category!) Any of the categories in this list could have become suddenly relevant or even important to anyone at some point in their life or even on multiple occasions; it all depends on what one is trying to do. The existence of ad-hoc categories reinforces this book’s thesis that categorization, through analogy-making, lies at the core of thought. Indeed, this phenomenon shows that whenever one is pursuing some goal (trying to escape from a burning house while grabbing the most important items, organizing a picnic, changing a lightbulb, planning one’s vacation, choosing one’s evening attire, and so forth), the lack of appropriate pre-existing categories in one’s mind is compensated for by the spontaneous creation of a new category.

And the category created on the fly is by no means a luxury, because there will be no chance of attaining one’s goal without it. For example, take the case of the earlier-mentioned category
possible Christmas presents for one’s twelve-year-old.
For the parent who conceives this goal, the brand-new category becomes a powerful filter through which the environment is perceived. As is the case for any category, this one will become ever more refined in the mind of its creator as time passes and more and more interactions take place with the environment.

This is far from being the end of the story, for in our heads, there are a vast number of other categories, just as non-lexicalized as ad-hoc categories but more durable, and of which we are generally unaware in daily life. They are not among the categories covered by the genius of one’s native language (though some might be lexicalized by certain languages), but they exist in the minds of many people and can be appropriately activated when the proper situation arises. And it’s quite possible for such categories to emerge out of ad-hoc categories that one has used many times. For example, ad-hoc categories such as
activities typical of camping trips, objects that could be useful for a picnic, objects that can comfortably be carried around in a small suitcase
are categories that have a tendency to become very stable in the minds of those people who are fans of camping, of picnics, or of traveling. More generally, and just as in the case of lexicalized categories, this kind of category can be evoked to help one confront a new situation — that is, to understand it, to think about it, and to make decisions about it. Such categories could be listed with no limit in sight, but the sampler that follows at least gets the basic idea across: