Read Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking Online
Authors: Douglas Hofstadter,Emmanuel Sander
In a course one of us taught, a student heard the anecdote of newlywed Carol signing with her maiden name and her friend Peter who “did the same thing every January”; this reminded the student of a time four years earlier, when she had changed
jobs. In her new job, she was supposed to answer the phone and say, “Hello, this is Company X”, but in her first few weeks she would often say the name of her previous employer, upon which she felt very silly. Does the fact that this student hit on that memory mean that four years earlier, she had constructed the highly abstract category
situations in which one is trapped by a habit that one is unable to update
? It’s hard to imagine what would have driven her to create such a high abstraction; it’s unlikely that she felt that someday she would need to be an expert in the spotting of situations of that sort. One can get along quite well in life without having constructed such a narrow category. Although we can be pretty confident that this student didn’t encode her mildly embarrassing phone-answering gaffes at such a rarefied level of abstraction, her encoding nonetheless involved a fair amount of generalization, because hearing the story about Carol’s maiden-name-signing gaffe brought her own old gaffes back to her mind swiftly and effortlessly.
Among the likely aspects of her encoding were the fact that she blurted out the wrong thing, that what inadvertently came out of her mouth was a relic of her recent past, that she wasn’t in control of what she said, that she was embarrassed by her slip, and so on. And so it seems probable that her retrieval of that four-year-old memory, triggered by the anecdote of Carol’s signing error, didn’t involve just one single and concise abstract conceptual skeleton that perfectly matched both the old and the new situations, but rather, that it depended on a number of separate, abstract, and important aspects of her old job situation, each of which had contributed to how she had perceived that situation’s essence at the time it happened. In other words, rather than one single perfectly-fitting conceptual skeleton — the magic key to memory retrieval — having been created when she made her telephonic errors, a number of smaller and independent concepts were built, and hearing the story of Carol reactivated enough of those concepts to remind her of having said, inappropriately, “Hello, this is company X”. In sum, although there is always some degree of abstraction in the act of encoding, there is not always exactly
one
highly abstract conceptual skeleton shared by the triggering event and the event retrieved from memory.
For a current event to trigger the recall of a far-off event that one hasn’t thought of in many years requires strong resemblances. For the long-buried memory to be triggered by what one is currently experiencing means that each side of the connection has to “give” a little — that is, some dimensions of the way we perceive the new and the old situation have to have sufficient flexibility. Even if the encodings of the events are far from reaching the maximal level of abstraction, they will go far beyond the most literal details of the experienced situations, because such literality confines remindings to the level of the very mundane. For example, in the case of the children in the Cinque Terre who were fascinated by grasshoppers, it takes only a tiny amount of abstraction to link this situation with Danny at the Grand Canyon, since both situations involve children, insects, and famous tourist spots. One feels that the stories are so close to being carbon copies of each other that such a reminding verges on the trivial. Luckily, the human mind goes way beyond this low level of reminding in the mental leaps that it carries out among countless stored memories.
In conclusion, is there always some amount of abstraction involved in the encoding of memories? To be sure. But does being reminded by a current event of a past event always depend on the two events exactly sharing a conceptual skeleton in one’s mind? By no means.
A local chef has just finished sautéing a fresh fish caught on a small fishing boat based in a nearby village. The side dish consists of steamed vegetables grown on a local organic farm. Meanwhile, elsewhere on the same planet, a microwave oven has just heated up a frozen dinner featuring fish grown in a factory and stuffed to the gills (literally!) with bone meal, accompanied by genetically modified vegetables that were grown in chemical fertilizer laced with pesticides.
Which of these two dishes appeals more? It’s probably not too hard to choose, but unfortunately, the first is expensive to produce and certainly is not amenable to mass production, and in addition it requires people who are passionate about what they do. Today it’s nearly impossible to make a living in such an authentic, old-fashioned way. And so, is there any way to successfully combine
that which allures but is unprofitable
, on the one hand, with
that which is cheaply manufactured though unappetizing
, on the other? Well, a good strategy would seem to be that of mass-producing something that emanates downhome appeal — if this is not a contradiction in terms.
Below we list some cases where marketing trickery can give rise to a false impression that tempts customers to buy without realizing what lies beneath the surface. Naïve would-be buyers, convinced that they have hit on genuine authenticity, fall for slick mass-produced articles — a successful ploy resulting from cold calculations in the business office.
Snails labeled “escargots de Bourgogne” seldom hail from Bourgogne. Today, this classic dish, so redolent to so many of France, is mostly imported from Eastern Europe, Turkey, or China, and when one is eating a snail, the chances are very slim that it actually grew in the shell in which it is found.
In a now-defunct chain of American bookstores, certain prominent sections used to be dedicated to “Local Authors”; this gave the impression that that very bookstore’s staff had played a role in the selection of the books found in that section. But in fact, the choice of which local authors to showcase was made far away, in the chain’s national headquarters, without any input at all from the local store.
Ads for certain little clay figurines representing historical figures or quaint folk icons proudly proclaim, “Hand-painted”, which projects a sweet old-fashioned postcardlike image of how these statuettes came to be. But the truth is that “Hand-painted” usually means “Made in China”. The statuettes of the little Danish mermaid or of the Napoleonic soldier seem far more exotic to the person who paints them than they are to the person who buys them.
These days, on the Venetian island of Burano, known for centuries for its intricate lacework tablecloths, blouses, scarves, doilies, and so forth, nearly all such items are in fact made in China and are exported to Italy. The appearance of authenticity is preserved, however, by the elderly women selling them, who sit in the tiny shops, wearing lace clothing and working away on lovely lace items.
In a town along the Nile in Egypt, a child comes up to tourists and offers to sell them “antiques” that she claims she found, when in fact they are mass-produced objects made for tourists and artificially aged in sand and water. In a small shop in the same town, a young boy is making scratches on a metal tray decorated by a machine, in an attempt to give the impression that he himself made all the decorations on it, and thus that all the trays have been locally decorated.
In a Christmas market in the main square of a small Austrian town, a “Corsican peasant” dressed in a traditional Corsican costume is selling “Corsican salamis”, but his only connection with Corsica is that he likes to vacation there. Next spring he’ll don a costume from the Auvergne and bald-facedly hawk “Auvergne cheese”.
In Cabourg, on the coast of Normandy, a
crêperie
on the main street is owned by a Parisian couple. On weekends, they rise very early and leave for Cabourg a few hours before the tourists do; symmetrically, a few hours after sales are over, having cleaned up and waited for the traffic jams to clear up, they head back home to Paris.
The recent upswing in popularity of sushi bars in Paris has coincided with a downswing in the popularity of Chinese restaurants. As a consequence, Chinese restaurateurs have opened up Japanese eateries. For unsavvy Caucasian customers, nothing tips them off that the Asian people waiting on them are as out of place as a flotilla of Greek servers would be in a French restaurant in the middle of Tokyo.
The items in this list all clearly share some quality, but that quality has no standard name. What, if anything, is the difference between them and the members of a category that does have a standard name? We would suggest that the items in this list implicitly define the boundaries of a category that is just as reasonable and intellectually appealing as any lexicalized one, such as
forgeries
, which is a category clearly related to this one but more general than it.
Our list implicitly defines a new concept whose only distinction from lexicalized categories is that it is not yet lexicalized. And so, grafting “faux” onto “authenticity”, we suggest the term “fauxthenticity”. This act of explicit labeling will help to anchor the concept in memory and will increase the likelihood of its being further extended in the future. Indeed, instances of fauxthenticity are easily found, sharing the conceptual skeleton that emerges from reading the previous examples, while also extending it in new directions.
On envelopes one receives these days, it’s common to see one’s name and address in what looks like handwriting, when in fact it has simply been computer-printed, using an intentionally informal-looking cursive font. There are even certain fonts that have randomizing algorithms in them that allow each letter token to be slightly different from other tokens of the same type, thus giving the impression that every letterform has been uniquely penned by a human hand.
In the automated telephone trees that one encounters whenever one calls any large business, a new trick has been added fairly recently — that of having the recorded voice insert hesitant pauses, or make slight mistakes, or even sound surprised by an afterthought, as if the “person” had just remembered something they should have said earlier. “Uhh… oh, yeah. So now, could you, um, just tell me your confirmation code one more time? Thanks a lot!”
In Italy, companies that send out automated emails to customers have largely abandoned the respectful second-person pronoun “Lei”, which is the traditional way of addressing people one does not know (corresponding to the French “vous”). They now use the informal pronoun “tu”, which can lead to absurdities, such as a “personalized” form letter that opens with “Egregio Professore, ecco la tua nuova carta Bancomat”, which comes across more or less as “Hey there, distinguished professor, old pal, here’s your new credit card!”
Sometimes one reads that a particular article is made of “genuine leatherette” or even “genuine artificial leather”, and oddly enough, no irony is intended. The idea is presumably that there is an industrial standard for imitating leather (or other natural products), and that meeting this standard constitutes a kind of authenticity.
We hope that some readers will be inspired to look around for further examples of
fauxthenticity
, as they are quite widespread, just waiting to be spotted. Much as we said about the category
bait-and-switch
toward the end of
Chapter 2
, people who have explicitly constructed the category
fauxthenticity
have a much clearer sense of the phenomenon than those who have not.
We’ve looked at a wide variety of situations in this chapter, in order to show that people constantly construct rich new abstract categories that have no labels, sparked by the perception of unconsciously perceived resemblances between situations. But what about animals less reflective than we are? Well, they do much the same, though they are limited by their mental level, which depends on the species they belong to. Take dogs, for instance. What concepts does a typical dog construct, in the course of its lifetime? Below we give a list of a number of concepts that we have observed in dogs we have personally known. (We’ve taken the liberty of using English words to express these categories.) Each of these concepts gets formed as a result of a long series of analogies made, day in and day out, over many years.
humans; male humans and female humans; adult humans; children; babies; friends and strangers; letter carriers; veterinarians…
dogs; puppies; my best dog-friend; birds; squirrels; cats…
water; my food; human food; my little treats; bones…
delicious; hot; cold; hard; soft; open; closed; nice; mean…
in; on; under; next to; in front of; behind…
day; night; pain; hands; mouth; eyes; feet; paws; orders; threats; my doghouse; my yard; other people’s houses; other people’s yards; the kennel; dog-doors; games I play with people; toys I can play with; toys I’m not allowed to play with; balls; frisbees; sticks; branches; doors; chairs; tables; leashes; rain; snow; trees; lakes; swimming pools; dog-dishes; cars; sidewalks; streets; staircases; little toys that look like dogs; robot dogs; stuffed animals; my master’s voice; my master’s voice on the telephone; thunder; fake barking (heard on the radio or the television, etc.)…
eating; drinking; playing; fighting; walking; staying; going out; going in; jumping; swimming; sitting; waiting; lying down; seeking; fetching; catching; going up; going down…
what’s good to eat and what’s not; what’s good to drink and what’s not; objects that I’m allowed to chew on and objects that I mustn’t chew on; loud harmless noises versus loud noises that could mean danger; places to swim; places where I can “do my duty” and places where I mustn’t; places where I’m allowed to sleep and places where I’m not; places where I’m allowed to eat anything that I find versus places where I mustn’t do so…