Read Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking Online
Authors: Douglas Hofstadter,Emmanuel Sander
A summary of the essence of this subcategory of
that
might be:
A sudden and unusual change of status requires one to modify the way one writes a certain item, but for some time thereafter, the old habit keeps on taking over and as a result, one frequently writes the item in the outmoded way.
Despite its verbose, quasi-legalistic description, this is a category that we all understand and are familiar with from various episodes in our lives. Below we give a number of scenarios, some that we’ve observed, others that we dreamt up, all of which share the essence of this category.
Marsha switched jobs and now works in another part of the city. The first few months after the change she found herself repeatedly heading off to her old workplace.
Pluto is no longer officially considered to be a planet, but most people still name it (or say that there are “nine planets”), when asked to describe the solar system.
Mike died but even after several months, his grieving widow, despite her best efforts, keeps on saying “we” and “us”.
A Dutch couple who lived in Paris for many years has returned to Amsterdam, and the wife, talking about her husband, who has just taken off on a business trip to New York, says, “Whenever possible, he uses Air France.” However, what she meant to say was, “Whenever possible, he uses KLM” (the Dutch national airline).
Richard, who just got a new car, is looking for it in the parking lot, but he can’t find it because the “search image” that he has in his mind is that of his old car. He doesn’t even see his new car when he’s looking straight at it!
Several weeks after school is back in session, a mother is asked the name of her son’s school, and she gives the name of his school the year before.
George still says, “When I turn fifty years old”, and yet his fiftieth birthday took place six months ago.
To call home, Larry dials the phone number that he used to have before he moved.
Julie forgets that her cousin gave birth to a second baby last year, and she asks her cousin how her son is doing as if there were only one.
A newly promoted lieutenant is caught off guard every time he hears anyone address him as “Captain Green”.
Lisa studied elementary education in college, and by coincidence her first teaching internship was in the classroom of her fourth-grade teacher, Mr. Long. He told her to call him “Marty”, and she tried, but often she blurted out “Mr. Long” by reflex.
A curious thing about the foregoing list is that nary a one of its members belongs strictly to the category defined above in italics, because if you read the fine print, you will see that it involves someone making an error in
writing.
And yet, the range of situations remains quite faithful to the word “that”, as used by Peter in his phrase
“That
happens to me every January.” Poor absent-minded Marsha or Captain Green could say to Carol, to console her, “Don’t feel bad —
that
happens to me all the time!”
The above list of scenarios greatly extends the category centered on Carol’s slip in signing and extended by Peter’s throwaway pronoun “that” — and yet it does so without in any way diluting the category’s essence. To the contrary, this broadening of the category, this fleshing-out of a kind of “sphere”, has made the category’s essence more vivid — namely, it is those habits that persist despite a sudden change that makes them invalid, or put otherwise, it consists of those situations in which one is trapped by a reflex that one has trouble reprogramming.
Someone might well ask, “Was such a conceptual sphere born only when Peter made his consoling remark to Carol?” We would reply that when Peter heard Carol’s lament, he understood its literal sense perfectly, but at the same time he extracted from it a more general idea — a more abstract notion that could apply to anyone, at any time, in any place. Peter’s phrase “that happens to me” was an act of unconscious pluralization, an offhand act of abstraction that broadened a “mental dot” (consisting of a single event) into a small “mental sphere” (a nascent concept).
Indeed, any sentence uttered by a human is implicitly surrounded by one or more “variations on a theme” (since no situation has only one essence) that come without bidding to the minds of listeners. That is, once a situation has been described, it naturally invites analogies to be made that will generalize it and render its essence (or rather, one of its essences) ever clearer. Such a generalized situation, created as an automatic by-product of a person’s comprehension of an uttered sentence, amounts to a new abstract category; as such, it invites simple mental slippages that will link it by analogy to yet other situations, differing in minor or even major ways from the “charter members”, and these situations will in turn become new members of the category. This process of repeated category extension based on analogy-making allows the fledgling category to expand very far, depending, of course, on the particular analogous situations that happen to be encountered as time goes by. And as the concept continues to grow outwards, the key idea that lies behind it becomes ever sharper in the mind of the person who is building it up, like a knife growing sharper with each new use.
David, a jazz musician who plays piano, trumpet, and guitar, one day heard that one of his old friends from music-school days, a bassoonist, had fallen off the roof of her parents’ house when she was fixing it up with her father, and the doctors said that she would never walk again. And yet the very next day after the accident, she managed to sit up in her hospital bed and ask for her bassoon. On hearing this, David exclaimed, “Unbelievable!
I
would never have been able to do that.”
Just
what
did he mean he would be unable to do? Was he imagining himself in the hospital, one day after having fallen from his parents’ roof while repairing it with his father, sitting up and asking for one of his three instruments (and we won’t even mention the idea of a bassoon!) to be brought to him? It seems very doubtful. Most likely, he simply wanted to communicate his admiration for the astonishing pluck of his former classmate as she struggled with the meaning of the tragic accident. And yet it’s not possible to completely suppress the image of David in his hospital bed shortly after some sort of traumatic accident, probably some kind of fall, asking for his trumpet (of his three instruments, the one that most resembles a bassoon).
It’s unlikely that David had a very precise idea of what he meant by his throwaway remark, but probably what he had in mind, and wanted to evoke in his listeners’ minds, was located somewhere between an extremely rarefied abstraction (any human act that reveals surprising pluckiness) and a nearly exact replay of the event (in which David himself would have fallen off his friend’s roof while working with her father, heard that he would be paralyzed for life, and the very next day asked for a musical instrument in his hospital bed). Such a midway scenario, featuring a set of middle-sized conceptual slippages, might be one in which David, shortly after being hit by an unexpected lfe-changing event, resists the temptation towards self-pity and rage and instead focuses on some passionate interest, perhaps musical, perhaps not, that he has had for many years.
One evening in Cairo toward the end of his first visit to Egypt, Nick took a taxi to go to a restaurant. Being naturally chatty and curious, Nick struck up a conversation with the taxi driver, who said that he was from the southern half of the country and belonged to the ancient tribe of the Nubians. On hearing this, Nick, who had recently visited the huge dam built by a Russian–Egyptian consortium on the Nile in the city of Aswan, where many Nubians live, asked the driver, “What effect did the building of the dam have on the Nubians?” The driver replied, “It was not good at all for us.” Nick said compassionately, “Yeah… It always turns out that way.”
The key question is: What was Nick actually talking about? Was he alluding to the previous dam built on the Nile at Aswan some seventy years earlier by a British–Egyptian consortium? Or to some other dams on the Nile in Egypt, located near cities where Nubians live? Or to other tribes that live in Egypt, or that live on the Nile in general? Or to all large-scale acts of construction undertaken by the Egyptian government that had infringed on minority groups? Or to any acts undertaken by any governments at all that infringed on minority groups? Or to any acts of construction that brought suffering on any group of people? Or was his remark the benevolent expression of a generalized sadness concerning the dwindling fate of native peoples scattered all around today’s industrial world? Or did he mean that the weak are always victims no matter what happens? Most likely Nick himself didn’t really know what he meant, and was simply leaving the door open to most of these possibilities (and possibly others). Nothing comes through unambiguously about either the scale or the nature of
the category that Nick concocted in his off-the-cuff remark. Many interpretations are plausible, but all of them rely on analogy and go far beyond the specific case of the Aswan Dam and the Nubians, and each one corresponds to a blurry-edged category.
The last few sections focused on the phenomenon of “banalogies”, in order to give some sense of their great frequency in everyday thinking. The diversity of the phrases that people use to convey such banal analogies hints at how common the phenomenon is, but on the other hand, this very richness hides one key difficulty for would-be collectors. Indeed, these simple analogies can slip by even the most attentive of ears, because the analogies are not spelled out explicitly and the sentences that express them tend to be bland and boring-sounding.
Just as an ordinary-looking figure wearing bland clothing does not stand out in a large crowd, especially when one is paying attention to the more striking people and activities all around, so me-too analogies don’t draw any attention to themselves in the midst of a sparkling conversation. Although they are understood with no problem, they tend to go by unnoticed. However, one helpful hint for people interested in studying the phenomenon is that they are often conveyed by phrases such as “I won’t let
that
happen again!” or “There you go again!” or “I’ll watch out from now on!” or “Next time this happens” or “Exactly the same thing happened to me!” or “I have that habit, too” or “I won’t ever fall for
that
again” or “That’s what you said last time” or “Don’t let them treat you that way ever again!” — and so on. Though bland, these are giveaway phrases. Another helpful hint is the word “exact” or “exactly”, as in the phrase “The exact same thing happened to me the other day!” The person who comes out with such a phrase is generally alluding to two situations that share a conceptual skeleton despite having many differences at the superficial level. Thus, for instance:
A man tries to read in bed but his wife says that even the extremely small battery-operated light that he attaches to his book keeps her from sleeping. Exasperated, he complains about her hypersensitivity to light. Not missing a beat, she replies, “You should talk! You do exactly the same thing in the morning. If I get up early and try to dress as quietly as a mouse, you always say that the noise, no matter how tiny it is, wakes you up.
You’re
the one who’s hypersensitive!”
A woman says that she had to cut her vacation short and head home immediately because during a huge thunderstorm her apartment had gotten flooded in two feet of water. Her friend says that he’d had “just the same experience” a few years earlier when he was in the middle of an important meeting at work and was called home because the neighbors’ house was on fire.
This reveals that when we listen to others tell stories, we all strip off each story’s surface particulars instantly, automatically, and unconsciously, until we feel we have arrived at the story’s true essence, and we then take that skeletal essence as the genuine
core of what we’ve just heard. It strikes us as being “what really matters here”. But this conceptual skeleton, this abstract core, this pure gist, is too stripped-down, too “naked” for us, and so we immediately try to wrap it into more familiar clothing by launching a search in our memory. And it is when a concrete personal experience comes bubbling up from our memory that we can most easily relate, in a concrete and vivid fashion, to what we have just been told. This explains why people can quite honestly exclaim, “Exactly the same thing happened to me!”; they are concentrating so hard on the shared conceptual skeletons of two stories that for them the differences, no matter how great they are, seem to evaporate. At the gist level, indeed, the two stories
are
exactly the same — they are just one single story.
Our natural inclination to relate to stories told by other people by converting them into first-person experiences dredged out of our dormant memories — this propensity to make analogies that link us with other people, or, more generally, to interpret any new situation in terms of another similar situation that comes to mind — is omnipresent, because doing so fulfills a deep psychological need.
Virginia receives her semi-annual royalty statement from her publisher. Eagerly she scans its pages of data. When she comes across the check — that’s the bottom line — she’s quite delighted. How come? Because the previous two times the amount had been rather low, and she had begun worrying that this trend was going to continue. The favorable comparison makes her happy. Once again, we have a trivial analogy — I compare what I just got with what I got a short while ago. One would be hard pressed to find a simpler mental act than that, but that doesn’t mean that such elementary comparisons don’t take place all the time, day in, day out, in the life of every human being.